A reserve is a price below which the seller will not sell. Reserve not met means the bidding has not reached it yet; Reserve met appears once it has.
If the auction ends underneath it, the item does not sell — and the room is told why: The reserve price wasn’t met, so this item didn’t sell.
What you are not told
The number. You see that a reserve exists and whether it has been passed. You never see what it is, and neither does anybody else in the room.
That is deliberate: a visible floor is a floor people bid exactly up to and no further.
What happens to the item
Nothing is sold and nothing is charged. On the seller's side it closes as Auction ended without a sale.
Most sellers relist it — often lower, often without the reserve, because an item that failed its reserve has just been told by the room that the reserve was wrong. What happens to an item nobody bids on
What you can do
Ask. "Was that close to the reserve? Will you run it again?" is a reasonable question and sellers usually answer it. Sometimes the answer is "it's yours at X", which is a sale neither of you would have reached otherwise.
Follow the store, so you hear when it comes back. How to follow a seller
Check their listings. Some sellers put a failed item up at a fixed price instead, where the reserve effectively becomes the asking price.
Why a reserve exists at all
For the item whose floor is set by something other than the seller's opinion — gold by metal weight, a graded card by the market, anything where going cheap is a real loss rather than a disappointment.
Used well it lets a seller open low to attract bidders while staying safe. Used on everything it flattens a show, because a room that keeps losing to invisible numbers stops bidding. How to set a reserve price
Reserve is not the same as the starting price
- The starting price is where bidding opens.
- The reserve is the floor below which it will not sell.
A reserve only means anything when it is above the start price — and the app enforces that the start cannot be higher than the reserve. So an item with a reserve has been opened deliberately low, which is usually good news for you.
If you were the top bidder
You have not bought anything and you owe nothing. Your bid simply did not clear the floor.
It is worth messaging the seller in that case specifically: you are the person who valued it most, and they now know their reserve was above what the room would pay. That conversation ends in a sale more often than not.
More: what a reserve price is, how auctions find a price, how bidding works.