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 284 clubs with enough listings to measure, the dearest live listing is typically 1.64 times the cheapest. Same model, same day, same country.

Putters29 models 2.28x

Single irons77 models 2.11x

Iron sets18 models 2.04x

Wedges84 models 1.65x

Fairway woods21 models 1.32x

Drivers46 models 1.21x

Why the order comes out like that

The tight end and the wide end are not arbitrary. Drivers 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.

Putters 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 putter 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 drivers the third quote will rarely beat the first by much, and on putters 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 £1750.00 at the dearest, across 8 listings from 3 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.

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 2,569,626 others. Every product we track shows its own spread.