The same club, two shops, and the gap between them

Everyone knows to shop around. Nobody tells you how much it is worth, or which clubs it is worth it on, because answering that means holding every live listing of the same club side by side and measuring the distance between the ends. That is a thing this site does anyway, so here is the answer.

Across 978 clubs with enough listings to measure, the dearest live listing is typically 1.81 times the cheapest. Same model, same day, same country.

Iron sets100 models 2.77x

Putters102 models 2.08x

Hybrids78 models 1.91x

Drivers144 models 1.84x

Wedges117 models 1.83x

Fairway woods103 models 1.82x

Single irons334 models 1.59x

Why the order comes out like that

The tight end and the wide end are not arbitrary. Single irons are the most completely specified thing in golf: a model, a loft, a shaft, a flex. Two of them with the same four attributes really are the same club, every seller knows it, and the price has nowhere to hide.

Iron sets are the opposite. Condition matters enormously and is graded by whoever is selling. There is no flex to pin down and often no loft printed. A iron set is closer to a used camera than to a commodity, and used cameras have wide markets.

So the honest version of "shop around" is: on single irons the third quote will rarely beat the first by much, and on iron sets it regularly beats it by half.

The current worst case

The widest live gap on a single model right now is the Titleist T150: £859.00 at the cheapest and £2359.00 at the dearest, across 47 listings from 8 different sellers. Nobody in that list is a villain. The cheap one is probably well used and the dear one probably immaculate, and no listing anywhere says which by how much.

What the gap is worth in practice

Ratios are abstract, so put money on it. On a category sitting at 2.77x, a club with a typical price around £150.00 will have live listings roughly £100.00 apart. That is not a rounding error, and it is available for the cost of opening three tabs rather than one. On a single iron at 1.59x the same exercise is worth a fraction of that.

The useful habit is therefore not "always shop around" but "shop around in proportion". Spend the effort where the market disagrees with itself, and take the first fair price where it does not.

Why nobody arbitrages this away

The obvious objection to a market this wide is that it should not survive. Somebody should buy the cheap ones and sell them at the dear price until the gap closes. Three things stop that happening.

The listings are not comparable at a glance. Condition is graded by whoever is selling, and no two sellers mean the same thing by "excellent", so a buyer cannot be sure the cheap one is the same product until it arrives. Search is genuinely hard: titles are written by hand, the same club appears under half a dozen spellings, and nothing in the market presents one model's listings side by side. And the inventory is one-of-a-kind, so the cheap listing is gone by the time a second buyer finds it, and the gap reopens with the next one.

None of that is going to be fixed by the sellers, because none of them benefit from it being fixed. It is fixed by looking at all of the listings at once, which is a thing software does well and a person does badly.

That is the argument for the whole site in one line: the number you need is not the price in front of you, it is the price in front of you compared with 1,752,084 others. Every product we track shows its own spread, and what a typical price means sets out how the middle of that range is worked out.