Why "60% off list price" means nothing

Almost every golf discount you will see quoted is a distance from a recommended retail price: a number the manufacturer printed and the shop is free to ignore. It tells you what somebody hoped the club would sell for. It tells you nothing about what it sells for.

We can put a figure on how much of the market runs this way, because our own tracker grades listings both ways and records which basis it used.

91%against a shop’s list price

The other 9% is against prices we recorded.

That is not a complaint about other sites. It is our board, and the shape of it is the interesting part. Across everything we grade, list-price comparisons are 33%, a third, not a majority. But a big percentage off a big RRP scores well, so those listings float to the top, and among the first few hundred a visitor sees they are 91% of the page. An average over the whole table would have hidden that entirely.

It happens for a dull reason. When a retailer feed hands us an RRP and we have not yet recorded enough sales of that exact club to have an opinion, the RRP is the only comparison available, so the listing is graded on it and climbs on a number we do not trust.

What that looks like at the extreme

The largest list-price claim currently on the board is 84% off, on a Callaway Epic Flash Star Hybrid at £61.95. The club is real and the price may well be fair. But the comparison is against a recommended price set when the club launched, and a launch price from years ago is not a thing you could pay today even if you wanted to. The percentage is arithmetic on a fossil.

The comparison that survives contact with reality

The alternative is duller and much harder: record what the same product actually changes hands for, over and over, until you have enough sightings to know its price rather than guess it. We have 1,739,674 recorded prices across 74,764 products, and a listing is judged against the history of that product.

It is harder because it can refuse to answer. A club we have seen nine times has no reliable typical price, so its page says so instead of inventing one, and it stays out of the rankings. An RRP comparison never has that problem, because an RRP is always available. That availability is the whole appeal, and the whole problem.

Where the RRP comes from in the first place

A recommended retail price is set by the manufacturer at launch, and in the UK it is exactly what the name says: a recommendation. Resale price maintenance, where a manufacturer forces a shop to hold a price, is unlawful here. So the RRP is a suggestion that no shop is obliged to follow, and after the first few months almost none of them do.

That makes it a strange thing to measure a discount from, and it gets stranger with age. The number does not move when the market does. A driver launched at £500.00 three years ago still carries a £500.00 RRP in a feed today, long after nobody has paid anything like it, so a shop selling it for £200.00 can advertise 60% off while charging the going rate. Nobody has lied. The comparison is simply against a price that stopped existing.

What the rules actually say

UK advertising rules do constrain this. The CAP Code requires that a comparison to a higher price is genuine, and guidance from the ASA and from Trading Standards has long held that a "was" price should be one the product was actually sold at, for a meaningful period, reasonably recently. A manufacturer's RRP that the retailer never charged is a different claim from a "was" price, and it is the looser of the two, which is part of why it is the one you see.

We are not accusing anyone of breaking those rules. The point is narrower and more useful to you: a claim can be entirely compliant and still tell you nothing about whether the price in front of you is good.

What to do with a discount claim

Ask what the percentage is measured from. If the answer is a list price, treat it as decoration and go looking for what the club sells for. Three or four live listings of the same model will tell you more than any badge. If the answer is a measured typical price, ask how many sightings it rests on. We print that number on every product page for the same reason.

And be most suspicious of the biggest numbers. A 70% discount on a current club is not a bargain that everyone else missed; it is almost always a comparison against something other than what the club sells for. The genuine finds on this site are mostly in the teens and twenties of percent, measured against prices we recorded ourselves, and they look far less exciting than the badges do. What a typical price means is the method behind that, and the gap between two shops is where the real money turns out to be.