Cash for gold and gold selling Which? Cash for gold investigation

Cash for gold

Which? compared cash for gold companies with jewellers and pawnbrokers

Cash for gold firms investigated

Which? Money researchers became concerned about the rise of cash for gold companies in 2009, and decided to conduct an undercover investigation into the service on offer from different types of gold buyers. 

We identified three items of gold jewellery to use in our investigation, and then purchased:

  • Four identical nine carat gold bracelets, costing £115 each; 
  • Four identical nine carat gold bangles, costing £215 each;
  • Four identical nine carat gold necklaces, costing £399 each.

We grouped the jewellery together so we had four sets of three different items. Each was then valued by:

  • Three independent high street jewellers;
  • Two independent pawnbrokers;
  • National pawnbroker chain the Money Shop;
  • Four TV advertised gold buying firms.

The four cash for gold companies we sent the jewellery to were: PostalGold.com, Money4Gold.co.uk, CashMyGold.co.uk and Cash4Gold.com.

We expected even the best merchants we tested to quote significantly less for the jewellery than we had paid for it. This is because we were selling the items second hand and were told we would be offered their meltdown value - which should act as a reminder to consumers that selling designer or nearly-new gold jewellery to any cash for gold buyer is likely to mean you lose out.

Even so, our research team were amazed at some of the low sums we were offered for our items: anything from just over £6 to almost £40 for our £115 bracelet, and from £22 to £119 for our £399 necklace.

We also identified other problems when researching these firms, which you can read more about on the Reasons to beware cash for gold companies page of this guide.

Our findings

Cash for gold
CompanyGold retail price £115Gold retail price £215Gold retail price £399
CashMyGold£6.43£9.64£22.50
Postal Gold£7.97£10.89£25.04
Money4gold£8.17£11.26Seea
Cash4Gold£10.31£14.57£31.48
Pawnbrokersb£26£32c£80
Jewellers£33£46£102

Table notes

  1. Demanded £9.95 Postal Order (costing us an additional £1 Royal Mail charge) to return item
  2. Average of three quotes
  3. No quote was provided by one merchant for the £215 item

As you can see from the table above, TV gold buyers consistently gave Which? researchers the worst quotes throughout our investigation. 

On average, the TV gold buyers offered us just 6% of the retail value of our gold. This compared poorly with the average price quoted by pawnbrokers, who gave us 17% of the retail value.

The jewellers we tested offered us the best rates. They were willing to pay what amounted to 25% of the retail value on average – more than four times what the TV gold buyers would pay.

In real money, this meant we would have reaped just £6.43 for our £115 bracelet if we’d sold it to CashMyGold, while we could have got £39 for it from one of our independent jewellers. We could have got £119 for our £399 necklace from an independent jeweller – £96 more than CashMyGold were offering.

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