Service > After Sales

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You are the highest bidder at auction end. Congratulations! It is the first time you won in an artelino auction. But what now? Is there anything you have to do or that you should know?

If this page should not answer your questions, please do not hesitate to contact us by email or phone. Phone calls are OK on seven days per week from about 9:00 AM until 9:00 PM our local time in Bavaria/Germany - Central European Time (CET). But please pay attention to the different time zone. We are 6 hours ahead of US East coast and 10 hours behind Melbourne.

Before Auction End

We automatically generate the invoices about 10 to 60 minutes after auction end. Please make sure that the data of your account like your shipment address and your shipment option (immediate shipment or HOLD option) are correct BEFORE auction end. The program that generates your invoice uses the data of your account - nothing else.

Shortly After the Auction

At auction end you can check in various ways if you are among the winners. You can use the catalog pages or the winners page. To see the bidding history, view the page with the detailed description of the item(s).

Typically not later than one hour after auction end you will receive an automatic email - a winners notification if you are among the high bidders or a "Thank you ...." message if you are among the "losers". The winners notification contains a kind of mini invoice and lists your shipping option (immediate shipping or HOLD) and the payment method. If you should have opted for payment by wire transfer (currently only for selected clients in Europe), you find our bank details at the end of the notification.

Charging

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The morning after the auction end we start charging your credit card. We keep your credit card details on paper. You need not submit your card details again unless we ask you to do so by email.

We confirm charging by email. This email also indicates if we keep your win(s) (consolidated shipping option/ HOILD) with us or are going to pack and ship.

If you opted with your account settings for consolidated shipping, your invoice was generated without the shipment fee, otherwise it includes the shipment fee.

It is important that your account settings reflect what you want - immediate shipping or keeping your prints up to 6 months for you. Our computer programs that control charging and shipping can only do what you specify with your account settings.

Shipping

We confirm shipping by programmed emails after we come back from the Post Office. Furthermore you can check the status of your orders in My Account. But you cannot trace your order(s) while they are in transit. National Postal Services do not yet have online tracking for international shipments.

Unpacking

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artelino's packing is the result of 10 years of experience in shipping art prints and very solid and safe. Please take the time for careful unpacking.

Do not use any sharp knives. To prevent your art prints from slipping inside the package during transport we use a lot of tapes. Please peel all tapes off with utmost care. Do not open the folder(s) with your art prints before you have removed all tapes and all packaging material from the scene of unpacking. If a tape gets in contact with the verso or the margin areas, you have a problem. And if a tape gets in contact with the image area, the color pigments will most probably be destroyed.

Conservation and Framing

Conservation and framing is a wide area. You find an article Care of Art Prints in our Edutainment section.

As a rule of thumb I advise that serious collectors who want to keep the full value of their art print the best way possible, should not frame nor otherwise expose the prints at all. Better do what the Japanese did in the 19th century. Store them in a drawer. You can use the folders in which we sent your prints. They are to our best knowledge acid free.

My Prints have not yet Arrived!

We ship by National Postal Services. It is the cheapest way and very reliable. And if you are not at home during the day, you can pick up your package at the nearest Post Office.

Your packages arrive usually within one week inside Europe and even in Australia. If you are in the U.S.A please admit at least two weeks. Sometimes even 4 weeks and before Christmas even 6 weeks are nothing to worry about.

We have shipped thousands of print packages since January 1998. We lost only two - one in France in 2006 and one in the USA in 2008. Even in this worst case you need not worry. The flat shipment fee that we charge includes insurance. In the case of a total loss we reimburse you the full amount. You do not have to make any insurance claims yourself. We pay you, and we handle this with our insurance company.

Damage

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Like total losses also transport damages are extremely rare. Apart from a few minor creases due to packing mistakes by us many, many years ago, we remember only one serious damage. A large package with a Paul Binnie print was brutally damaged - apparently by a forklift.

If you should experience a damage, please contact us immediately and send us a few photographs of the damaged print(s) and the outside packing. Please do not throw away the packaging material until we will have settled the damage with you.

We handle a damage like a complete loss. You are reimbursed by artelino.

Tracking and Tracing

While your shipments are in transit you cannot track them. We ship by National Postal Services. They do not yet offer online tracking for international shipments.

However if your shipments should be overdue, we can set up a tracer with the German National Postal Service for you. This takes from several days until several weeks before we will receive an answer. In nearly all cases when we set up a tracer, it was obsolete by the time we received the answer. The package had been delivered in the meantime.

Returns?

If you acquire something from a brick and mortar auction house, you cannot return it. To make you feel more comfortable, artelino gives you a right to return an item without any reason.

If you want to return, please read our return policy and contact us by email. Return the item(s) in the original packing within 10 days after receipt. We will reimburse you the amount you paid minus the shipping fee and a handling fee of $20 (residents of Germany please read our terms and conditions for a different handling).

Returns are a sensitive issue for us. As we pay our consignors shortly after auction end, we cannot back charge the consignor with your return, let alone the costs and complexity this would require. In a nutshell: If we offered a return handling like a general mail order business from which you can order five sweaters and return the two you like best, we would soon be ruined.

We solve this problem in a rather pragmatic way. Clients who return a win - unless we have made a mistake in our descriptions - have to be aware that we might not continue business with them. As a rule of thumb, we discontinue business with first-time winners who return something. Clients who have bought from us several times before can usually return twice before we propose the "separation".

Requesting Shipment of your Orders on HOLD

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artelino offers you a rather unique service to make you save shipment fees. You can accumulate your wins from several auctions for up to 6 months and we ship consolidated for one shipment fee. You can release your orders on HOLD either by sending us an email or from your account. We recommend to release from My Account as it is hundred percent reliable in contrast to email.

After you logged in your account, please choose "Orders and Invoices" from the menu. On the next page, please select "Request Shipment of HOLD Orders" from the drop-down menu and click "GO". Then flag the order(s) that you want us to ship (usually all) and click the button on bottom "Ship Checked Orders".

Send us your Feedback

artelino was established in 2001. We want to be the best online auction for the art products in which we are specialized. Please do not hesitate to let us know if there is anything you think we could do better. Feel encouraged to send us your negative or positive feedback.