How buyers are assessed here
Any site that earns commission from the buyers it recommends owes you a written method you can check it against. This is mine.
The short version
- Buyers are ranked on what they pay and how they behave.
- Commission never changes an ordering.
- Some of the best answers pay nothing at all.
What is measured
Percentage of melt actually paid
Not the advertised rate. What a real lot of ordinary sterling scrap converts to, after any deductions, expressed as a percentage of the melt value calculated the way the valuation page sets out. Advertised headline rates usually apply to bullion or to large quantities and tell a household seller very little.
Whether the quote holds
The single most important behavioral test. Does the number you were quoted survive contact with the metal arriving? A buyer whose offers routinely drop after they take possession is disqualified regardless of the headline rate.
The cost of saying no
Declining should be free, prompt and insured. Where return shipping is charged to the seller, or where declining is slow or awkward, that friction is a deliberate product and it counts heavily against a buyer.
Transparency of weight and purity
Does the buyer show the weight they worked from and the purity they assumed? Photographs on arrival? A stated spot reference and an expiry? These are cheap for an honest operation to provide and expensive for a dishonest one.
Insurance in transit
What is actually covered, by whom, and up to what value. Most ordinary carrier cover excludes precious metals, so a buyer who is vague here is either careless or hoping you will not ask.
What disqualifies a buyer outright
Some failures are not a matter of degree. A buyer showing any of these is not listed here at any commission rate.
Quotes that systematically drop on arrival. An occasional revision with a documented reason is legitimate. A pattern is a business model, and it is the single most damaging practice in this trade.
Charging the seller to return declined goods. This converts a free quote into a hostage situation and it is indefensible.
Manufactured urgency. Quotes expiring in an hour, claims that the market is about to turn, pressure to decide on a call. Real price locks have real windows and no salesperson attached.
Refusing to state weight and purity. If a buyer will not tell you the inputs, there is no offer to evaluate.
Gold IRA and retirement account promotion. This site does not link to that market. The payouts are the largest in the sector and the regulatory record is the worst, and neither of those facts is a coincidence. Someone selling inherited cutlery is not the right audience for a retirement product.
How commission is handled
Some buyers listed here pay a commission when a reader sells through a link. Some pay nothing. Both appear, and the ordering does not distinguish between them.
Where commission exists it is generally a percentage of the transaction rather than a flat fee, which means it increases when you are paid more. That alignment is better than a fixed bounty, but it is not a solution to the conflict and should not be presented as one. The honest position is that an incentive exists, it is disclosed, and the method above is written down so you can hold the recommendations to it.
Two practical consequences. First, a local coin dealer or a specialist auction house frequently is the right answer for collectable pieces, and neither pays anything, so the coins page sends you to them anyway. Second, where the correct advice is to wait for a calmer market, the pages say wait, even though nobody earns anything from patience.
The commercial relationships themselves are set out on the disclosure page.
What is not measured, and why
Star ratings from review aggregators are not used as evidence. In this sector many comparison sites are themselves affiliates, review volume is easy to influence, and a five star average tells you nothing about whether quotes hold after the metal arrives. Where a buyer's public reputation is mentioned here, the source is named so you can weigh it yourself.
Where this method is weak
No method is complete, and pretending otherwise would undermine the point of publishing one.
Percentages move. A buyer competitive this quarter may not be next, because spreads respond to volatility and to competition. Anything here is a snapshot, and the right protection is always to get three current quotes rather than trusting a page.
Coverage is uneven. There are many local dealers and only one of me, so this site can describe categories of buyer well and individual local shops barely at all. That is a real limitation and it is why the advice keeps returning to comparing quotes yourself.
Behavior is observed, not audited. I am not inspecting anyone's books. Assessments rest on published terms, on what buyers actually do when tested, and on eighteen years of competing against these firms. That is better than guesswork and considerably short of certainty.
If your experience contradicts what is written here, that is the most valuable correction this site can receive. Tell me, and the page changes.
What gets a buyer excluded outright
Ranking is the second question. The first is whether a buyer belongs on the site at all, and a handful of practices remove one regardless of what they pay.
Charging to return declined goods. A seller who does not like the offer should get their property back at the buyer's cost. Charging for the return converts a bad offer into a trap: the seller accepts a number they would have refused, because refusing now costs money. Any buyer who does this is off the site.
Quotes that move after the parcel arrives. A number quoted before shipping should be the number paid, absent a genuine discrepancy in weight or purity that the seller can verify. Systematic revision downward on arrival is the oldest practice in this trade and the hardest for a seller to detect from home.
Melting before the seller has accepted. Once metal is melted the decision is irreversible and any collectible premium is gone forever. A buyer who melts on receipt has removed the seller's ability to say no.
Refusing to state a percentage. A buyer who will not say what proportion of melt they pay, in writing, when asked plainly, is telling you something. It is a fair question with a short answer.
Fear marketing. Currency collapse pitches, invented deadlines, and "prices may never be this high again" are aimed at people who are already anxious about money. A firm willing to sell that way to buy your metal is not a firm to trust with it.
What is deliberately not measured
A method is defined as much by what it ignores. Several things that look like quality signals are left out on purpose.
How the site looks. Some of the fairest buyers in this trade run websites that appear to date from 2004, and some of the worst have beautiful ones. Design correlates with marketing budget, not with payout.
Review scores. Precious metals reviews are among the most heavily manipulated online, in both directions, and a seller who has no idea what their metal was worth cannot tell you whether they were paid fairly. A five-star review saying "quick and easy" is evidence about logistics and nothing at all about price.
Company age and size. Longevity means a business survived, which is not the same as treating sellers well; plenty of long-lived operations survived precisely on wide spreads.
Accreditation logos. Most of the badges displayed in this sector are paid memberships rather than audits.
What is measured instead is narrow and checkable: the payout percentage against melt, whether the quote survives contact with the parcel, who pays shipping and insurance in each direction, what happens to declined goods, how quickly payment lands, and whether the terms are stated before you commit rather than after.
How to test any of this yourself
The method is published so it can be checked, and checking it takes an afternoon rather than expertise. Work out the melt value of what you have using the arithmetic. Get three quotes from different categories of buyer: a pawn shop, a local coin dealer, a mail-in operation. Convert each quote into a percentage of melt.
If the spread you find is roughly what the buyers page describes, the method is holding. If a buyer this site rates well comes in far below what is claimed, that is a failure of this site and worth reporting. Either way you finish the afternoon knowing what your metal is worth, which was the point.
How the guides themselves are written
Every number that appears in a guide comes from one of three places, and the guide says which. Public data, such as spot prices, statutory purity standards and coin specifications. Direct experience of the trade, which covers what buyers actually pay and how they behave when tested. Or reader reports, which are treated as signals rather than proof until several agree.
Where none of those supports a claim, the claim does not get made. That is why pages here say a range rather than a figure, and why phrases like most buyers appear far less often than they would in marketing copy. A specific-sounding number with nothing behind it is worse than an honest range.
Pages carry a review date rather than a publication date, because the useful question is when something was last checked, not when it was first written. When a correction lands, the page changes and the date moves.