An auction bid is not a price

The most misleading number in used golf is a live auction with no bids on it. A driver at ninety-nine pence looks like the find of the year and is simply a seller choosing a low opening bid, which is the standard way to attract bidders. It is not a price. It is an invitation.

That is not a subtle point, but it has a consequence that runs through the architecture of this site, so it is worth setting out properly.

What a bid would do to a price history

Everything here works by grading a price against a history of prices for the same product. Let auctions into that history and it fails in both directions at once. The early bid enters the record and drags the median down, and the same bid is then graded against the median it just moved and comes out as an enormous discount. The site would manufacture its own bargains and then believe in them.

So auctions are not filtered out of the price history. They are stored in a different table, and nothing in the code that writes price history can see them. That is a structural separation rather than a rule somebody has to remember: with one table it would be a single careless join away from happening, and a rule that depends on nobody ever writing that join is not a rule.

Why there is no chart on this page

The obvious thing to publish here is a figure: unbid auctions sit at such and such a percentage of the going rate. We are not going to print it, and not only because samples of pure auctions with solid reference prices are small enough to move by tens of percent between one sweep and the next.

Every auction here is an eBay listing, and we do not measure eBay prices against anything: not against our typical prices, not against a shop, and not against each other. eBay prices are not used in our typical prices or grades at all. A bid set beside a typical price is a comparison, and a figure built from thousands of them would be a model of what eBay items go for, which is exactly the kind of number this site exists to be careful about.

What we do show

The auctions page lists the 994 live auctions closing soonest, shown as eBay lists them: the current bid, how many bids, the postage and the time left. Ungraded, unranked, never set beside another price, and never fed back into anything.

The other half of the arithmetic

A bid is not what you pay either. Postage on a golf club is rarely trivial, and an auction closing at the going rate has cost you more than the going rate by the time it reaches you. That is why the auctions page shows the postage beside every bid.

What a typical price is, and when we decline to state one, is the other half of this.