What we mean by a typical price, and when we refuse to give one
The method behind every figure on this site, including how often it declines to produce one.
Every price on this site is compared against a typical price, and that phrase is doing a lot of work. This page is what is underneath it, because a number whose method you cannot inspect is a number you should not act on.
What it is
Every time our tracker sees a product listed, it records the price. A typical price is the median of those sightings for that exact product over the last 30 days. The median, not the average, because one mispriced listing at ten times the going rate drags an average somewhere no real club has ever sold, and does nothing to a median.
"That exact product" is stricter than it sounds. A product here is a model, a variant, a flex and a loft. A stiff 9.5 degree driver and a regular 10.5 degree driver of the same model are two products with two separate prices, because treating them as one produces a figure that is wrong for both.
When we refuse
A median of three sightings is not a market price, it is three numbers. So a product only gets a stated typical price once we have seen it at least 8 times at 3 different prices. Below that the page says we do not know, and the product stays out of the rankings entirely.
That is the number most sites would not publish. It says that for the majority of what we track we will not commit to a price, and we would rather print that than pad it out with medians of two.
Why the total keeps moving
The tracker runs through the day, so a product that was short of the bar this morning can clear it this afternoon, and both the typical price and the coverage figure above change as it does. Nothing on this site is written into the page. We have 2,569,626 recorded prices across 28,051 products and the figures are read from that when you load it.
What it is still not
A typical price is what a product has been listed at, not what it sold for. We can see every asking price on the open market and none of the closing ones, and anybody claiming otherwise about a used-goods market is describing data they do not have. Asking prices track selling prices closely enough to be useful and are not the same thing, and that gap is the honest limit of everything here.
We also do not use auction bids. A bid is not a price, and they are stored in a separate table so that they cannot leak into a median by accident.
How the grading works, and why we do not grade against list prices.
AdLinks to sellers are affiliate-tagged where we have a programme. If you buy, this site may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. It plays no part in any figure above, which are computed from prices before any link is built. How this works.
Every figure here is read from the tracker when the page loads, so it moves as the market does. Written by George Thirlaway. About this site.