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 tried to measure it and we are not going to print it.

The problem is the sample. To compare a bid against a real price you need an auction with no Buy It Now muddying what the current bid means, for a product we have seen enough independent sellers list to know its price. Of 582 live auctions, 55 clear that. Split by how much bidding has happened, the largest group is 24 auctions. Medians over samples that size move by tens of percent between one sweep and the next, and the three groups currently disagree with each other about which direction the effect even runs in.

A number like that has exactly the property this site exists to complain about: it would look authoritative, it would be quoted, and it would not be stable enough to mean anything. The argument above does not need it. When we have enough pure auctions with solid reference prices, the figure will appear here, and if it contradicts what everyone assumes, that will be the interesting part.

What we do show

The auctions page lists what is closing soonest, with the current bid beside the typical price for the same product where we have one. Ungraded, unranked, and never fed back into anything. That comparison is worth something in the last few minutes, when the bid has stopped being an invitation and started being a price. It is close to worthless with three hours left, and the page says so at the top.

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. Every figure on this site includes shipping for that reason. It is the difference between a comparison and a sales pitch.

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