Seller, Negotiator or PCP Buyer? The Three £2.99–£4.99 Packs

Most of the Car Check Packs are built around a car’s history. Three of them are not. The Seller Pack (£2.99), the Negotiator Pack (£4.99) and the PCP Buyer Pack (£4.99) are built around a task: setting your own asking price, arguing someone else’s price down, or working out what a car on finance is really going to be worth to you.

Before anything else, the one thing that matters most about all three: none of them contains the Full Provenance Report. None of them tells you whether a car is recorded as stolen, whether it has been written off, or whether its mileage record is inconsistent. If you suspect a car is stolen, walk away and contact the police on 101. The PCP Buyer Pack is a partial exception on a single point — it contains the Outstanding Finance Check, but not the rest of the provenance report. If you are buying a car rather than pricing one, read section 5 before you buy any of these.

1. What Each Pack Contains

Every pack is a bundle of the same reports you can buy individually — priced lower than buying them one by one. These three are the smallest bundles we sell.

All three cover one car. Prices are as shown on the site at the time of writing; the page price is always the price you pay.

2. The Seller Pack — £2.99

The strapline on the page is “price your own car right”, and that is the whole job. Three reports, one registration:

• The Current Valuation (UKVD) gives you today’s figure for the car as it stands.
• The Price Predictor (Standard) is the reason the buy step asks for a postcode as well as the registration and the mileage — it is a local figure, not a national one.
• The Live market demand reading tells you how much interest there is in cars like yours right now, which is what decides whether your asking price is a starting point or a ceiling.

That consent line reads, in full: “I consent to my vehicle report being generated and delivered immediately, and I acknowledge that once it has been delivered I lose my 14-day right to cancel under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013.” It is worth reading rather than clicking past. The reports are built and delivered on the spot, which is precisely why the cancellation right falls away.

If you are selling your own car, the omission that matters least is the provenance report — you already know the car’s history because you have owned it. That is exactly why this pack exists at this price.

3. The Negotiator Pack — £4.99

“Price ammo before you haggle.” The Negotiator Pack takes the Seller Pack’s three reports and adds two that look forward rather than at today:

• Future Value & Depreciation — what the car is projected to be worth later, which is the difference between an asking price that looks fair and one that looks fair only today.
• The Desirability rating — a read on how sought-after this particular specification is.

Used together, the five reports give you something specific to say. “It feels expensive” is not a negotiating position. “The current valuation is X, demand for this spec reads as Y, and the depreciation curve puts it here in three years” is. The pack does not tell you what to offer, and it cannot tell you what the seller will accept — it gives you the same figures the trade works from.

4. The PCP Buyer Pack — £4.99

“Buying on finance.” This is the only one of the three with a red-flag check in it, and the contents track the questions a finance deal actually turns on:

• Outstanding Finance Check — whether an agreement is already registered against the car by a lender. Under hire purchase, PCP or conditional sale the lender owns the car until the last payment, so an existing agreement has to be settled before the car can properly be sold to you.
• Current Valuation (UKVD) — what the car is worth now, against what you are being asked to finance.
• Future Value & Depreciation — the figure that decides whether a balloon payment at the end of a PCP looks sensible or optimistic.
• Car Tax (VED) — the annual cost that sits alongside the monthly payment.

Notice what is not there. The Outstanding Finance Check is one section of the Full Provenance Report; the PCP Buyer Pack contains that one section and none of the others. It is a finance-focused pack, not a history-focused one.

5. The Limits — What None of Them Checks

This is the section to read twice. None of these three packs contains the Full Provenance Report. That report is the one that covers:

• the stolen vehicle check against the Police National Computer;
• outstanding finance;
• insurance write-off and salvage records;
• mileage and clocking analysis;
• keeper and owner history;
• plate and colour changes;
• import, export and scrapped markers.

So a Seller Pack or a Negotiator Pack will not tell you a car is recorded as stolen, written off or clocked. A PCP Buyer Pack will tell you about registered finance — and nothing else on that list. Provenance data is provided by Experian, and none of these three packs buys any of it beyond that single finance section.

Two smaller limits are worth stating as well. These packs contain no Safety Recall Check — which the DVSA also publishes free at gov.uk/check-vehicle-recall — so an unfixed manufacturer recall would not surface. And none of them carries a Data Guarantee — the Data Guarantee attaches only to the provenance report, and there is no provenance report here for it to attach to.

6. What the Same Reports Cost Separately

Each pack is cheaper than the same set of reports bought one at a time in the Paid Check builder:

The comparison is real, but it is narrow: it compares a pack with the same reports bought separately, nothing more. It does not make a task pack a cheaper version of a history check, because a history check is not in it.

7. If You Are Buying, Not Pricing

Here is the plain advice. A task pack answers a money question. A provenance report answers a “should I touch this car at all” question. If you are buying, you need both, and there are two sensible ways to get there.

• A task pack plus a provenance report. The Full Provenance Report is £5.99 on its own. Add it to the Negotiator Pack (£4.99) or the PCP Buyer Pack (£4.99) and you have the history and the price argument.
• The Essential Pack at £5.99. That one pack contains the Full Provenance Report, the Safety Recall Check, the Current Valuation (UKVD), Car Tax (VED), Spec & Options and the Full Vehicle Identity check, for the same £5.99 as the provenance report alone. If the choice is between a task pack and the Essential Pack for a car you intend to buy, the Essential Pack is the one that covers the things that can cost you the whole car.

The three task packs earn their place when the history question is already settled — you own the car, or you have already run a provenance report on it. Used that way they are good value at £2.99 and £4.99. Used as a substitute for checking, they are the wrong tool.

Final Thoughts

Seller for pricing your own car, Negotiator for arguing someone else’s down, PCP Buyer for a car you are taking on finance. All three do a narrow job well and none of them pretends to do more. Just keep the boundary in mind: they are about what a car is worth, not about what has happened to it. If you are handing money to a stranger, the £5.99 that buys the Full Provenance Report — or the Essential Pack at the same £5.99 — is the part you should not skip.

This guide provides general information and is not legal or financial advice. The valuation, demand and depreciation figures in these packs are projections from market data supplied by our data providers, and the finance data in the PCP Buyer Pack is provided by Experian and shows only agreements lenders have registered against the vehicle; the mistake this article exists to prevent is treating a task pack as a history check, because none of the three contains the Full Provenance Report and so none of them checks stolen, write-off or mileage records. SortedCars is not a lender, credit broker, insurer or financial adviser. We receive no commission from any provider mentioned in this article.