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.

98%against a shop’s list price

The other 2% 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 98% 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 92% off, on a Callaway Big Bertha WarBird Driver at £19.95. 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 2,569,626 recorded prices across 28,051 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.

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.