BullionStar review

BullionStar is a product dealer rather than an exchange. You buy an identifiable item — a PAMP kilobar, a Britannia, an Australian Kangaroo — at a listed price that already includes the dealer's margin, and you decide at checkout whether it is delivered, collected from the showroom at 45 New Bridge Road in Singapore, or moved straight into the vault.

The distinguishing feature is that a live buy-back price sits next to the sell price on every product page. Round-trip cost is visible before you commit, which is unusual in physical bullion retail and makes cross-shopping honest. The company also runs its own BSP gram programme, a house product denominated in grams that trades at a tighter spread and stores far more cheaply than named bars.

There is no single premium figure because it is product-dependent: kilobars carry the thinnest margin, fractional coins the widest, and everything moves with wholesale supply. Vault storage on standard gold products is 0.39% a year, accrued daily and invoiced each 1 March, with a small daily minimum of SGD 0.19 per jurisdiction.

BSP grams store at 0.09% a year, which is the cheapest rate anywhere in this comparison — but you are holding a house programme rather than a serial-numbered bar you could name in a claim, and that is a genuine structural difference, not a marketing detail. Silver and platinum store at 0.59%. A physical withdrawal from the vault costs SGD 129 per instance on standard products, so plan exits in one movement rather than several.

Vaulted products are held segregated and off-balance-sheet, and BullionStar publishes audit reports along with a facility that lets clients view their own holdings. Singapore is the relevant jurisdictional advantage: investment precious metals are exempt from GST, there is no capital gains tax, and the country's bullion infrastructure was built deliberately as policy in the early 2010s.

The company operates its own vault rather than outsourcing it, which shortens the chain of custody, and the showroom means you can physically inspect and collect metal — a rare option among online operators.

Funding options are unusually broad: bank transfer, card, cryptocurrency and cash in store. Settlement currencies include SGD, USD, EUR and others, so choosing the currency you already hold avoids a conversion cost.

Selling is straightforward because the buy-back price is already published — you accept it and settle. The friction sits in the physical withdrawal fee and in international shipping if you are outside Singapore, where insured freight and any import tax in your own country can dwarf the platform's own charges.

It suits a buyer who wants real, identifiable product with an Asian vaulting option and a visible round-trip cost, and it suits anyone who values a tax-neutral jurisdiction outside the US and EU.

It suits less well a pure cost minimiser buying small fractional coins, where product premiums are wide, and it suits poorly anyone who needs the metal physically near them in Europe or North America, because delivery from Singapore adds freight and import considerations.