01
What we remove
A search for one club returns a lot of things that are not that club. Leaving them in would quietly distort every median.
Shafts sold alone. A shaft with an adapter is not a driver.
Headcovers, grips, tools and weight kits sold as the product. A club sold with its headcover stays; a headcover sold by itself does not.
Tour-issue and collector items. A Circle T putter trades in a different market at ten times the price.
Multi-club lots. A driver sold with two fairway woods is not a driver price.
Other models the search dragged in. A search for one generation returns the next one; we separate them.
Wrong club type. An 18° "driver" is a fairway wood, whatever the seller called it.
One thing we keep, and the limit of it. About a fifth of fixed-price sales close through an accepted offer. These are not auctions: nobody bid, the seller listed a price and a buyer negotiated. eBay does not publish what that buyer actually paid, so for those sales we record the listed price. The buyer may have paid less. We keep them because they are a fifth of the market and dropping them would remove 46 pages, and because they price like the rest: inside the same page they sit 0.4% below straight fixed-price sales, and in 79 of 182 comparable pages they sit higher, so they are not padded asking prices. But we cannot verify the closing amount on them, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
02
Where this is still rough
A model name is a guess about what a listing contains. Most of the time it holds. Sometimes it does not, and we would rather say so than let you find out.
Some pages carry a version called Standard. That is the catch-all: every listing whose exact model we could not read from the title. On a club sold under one name for thirty years, that bucket can quietly hold several different clubs, and the price becomes an average of things that are not the same.
We split them apart every week, one family at a time, using the sales themselves to tell us which names are hiding in there. About two sales in five still sit in a Standard bucket, down from more than half. That share will keep falling and will never reach zero.
Where a page mixes too much to mean anything, we do not publish it at all. Where it is merely imprecise, we publish it with the margin written above the price. Neither is perfect, and both beat a confident number built on a mess.
03
Why fixed-price sales
Every price on this site comes from fixed-price sales, where the seller names a number and waits for the right buyer. It is what one costs you today, and 87% of used clubs sell this way.
Auctions are left out. An auction must sell on its closing date, to whoever happens to be bidding, so it runs lower and swings more. Blending it in would pull every price down for a reason that has nothing to do with the club.
The one exception: a club with fewer than ten fixed-price sales. Rather than show nothing, we take the median of all its sales, auctions included, and the page says so.
04
What we are not
We do not buy or sell golf clubs. The trade-in quotes you find elsewhere are published by companies whose business is buying your club, which means their number includes their margin.
We have no inventory, no trade-in desk, and nothing to gain from your club being worth less than it is.