Oh to be a fanatic! Us golf fanatics are a compulsive obsessive bunch. What we will do to improve our swing or drive by one micron! We lay into all sorts of equipment, game improvement irons etc. etc. If we are going to spend this kind of money, how can we improve on the bargains we find? I am not going to fill this article with my theories on club selection and ball placement, I will leave that for braver authors. However where I feel comfortable is showing you the hows and whys of finding high quality golf brands at discount prices and how to go about purchasing them. Lets establish how and where you can find nicely discounted golf products, and also grasp a basic insiders guide to this market.

Like any other market for innovative products new products sell at a premium as older models are off loaded through various channels. Therefore you could hope for discounts on new items from 10% to probably a maximum of 30% and all the way up to 60% on older year models. However it is even possible to find discounts on eBay on the newest clubs, especially if they are very lightly used. Think about it, trying on and testing golf clubs is difficult at best. Therefore many golfers discard clubs after a first light use age. There is a nice fluid market for both new and slightly used golf clubs on eBay.

With a large volume of most golf clubs being traded everyday, this is the ideal near efficient market. One can study the dynamics of this micro-market and determine some useful buying rules. With a little more information than the rest of the marketplace, one can almost certainly make some intelligent buying opportunities. This article focuses on how to identify these gaps and often purchase golf clubs for 20-60% below retail.

This article should be read together with my longer piece and a web site, which produces the information required to identify buying nuggets. Find the links and URLs to these two sites at the bottom of this article. The niche site focuses specifically and only on data for the golf clubs and balls market. Every few minutes this site goes out and find information on the top brand names and most sought after models. So keep checking back.

Most information on eBay focuses on the selling element, i.e. how to sell your clubs. I have tended to specialize on the buying end and trying to identify market opportunities and price in-efficiencies to really capture excellent deals. To do this we need to understand the dynamics of the eBay market place. Like any other market it is supply demand driven, and like a large flee-market if a buyer has knowledge of how many items are for sale at what prices and how many other buyers are in the market, then that buyer can capture the upper hand. Lets focus a little more on supply.

The eBay supply dynamic is a little different in that supply of an item must be seen at a point in time. In other words, because auctions end at different times, one needs to grasp the number of auctions ending in close proximity for the same item. This gives you a feel for the supply of items or in our case cameras. What makes this interesting is that today there could be a large amount of auctions ending for a particular model, but next week there could be very few. This is one element driving the price.

The demand side is slightly more complex and hidden from the average eBay buyer. This is where that the web site I refer to at below has some useful data. Demand in eBay terms is measured (by sellers) as a number of factors - how many people view my auction, how many people ask questions, how many people place me on their watch page, and how many people actually bid. Obviously as we progress down this list the data become more reliable as an indication of demand. Page views are not easy to obtain, although some sellers place a publicly viewable counter on their auction pages. Questions and watchers are available to sellers, and the special web site mentioned below will expose this information. Number of bids is available for all to see.

Now if we happened to produce a graph as the auction progresses of the changes in the number of questions, watchers and bids one can easily see how the demand is changing as time progresses. Typically if questions are high and watchers are high, but bids are low, this may indicate some confusion (for example a spelling mistake in a model number) and a possible buy opportunity. If watchers are very high and climbing, but bids are low, this can point to a last minute bidding war, and a stay out indicator.

Armed with this information and also a quick summary of other similar auctions ending soon, plus a quick feel for the skill set of the seller and the current highest bidder, one can see a picture very different from the average eBay buyer. Soon the trained eye will observe some nice buying opportunities. For the compulsive obsessive golfer such as you author this will soon bring in a number of golf club opportunities that are quite a bit cheaper than retail. Who know I may even buy and sell clubs every few months till I reach that mystical place I so yearn for. For example it is quite possible to find gems at 20-40% of retail prices. Sometimes a lightly used golf clubs will offer some unique bargains and discounts, especially if you are comfortable with a brand and model.