Most people who bring gold in have never sold any before. They have a chain that broke years ago, a ring that does not fit, or a box of bits that came down from a relative. The most common question we get is a fair one. How do you know what it is worth?
Here is the whole thing, start to finish. There is nothing clever about it.
Your price comes down to three things
The purity. The weight. The gold price on the day. That is it.
Purity, which is the carat
Pure gold is 24 carat. Jewellery is almost never pure, because pure gold is too soft to wear. It gets mixed with other metals to make it hard enough.
9 carat is 37.5 percent gold. 14 carat is 58.5 percent. 18 carat is 75 percent. 22 carat is 91.6 percent.
So a 9 carat chain and an 18 carat chain of exactly the same weight are worth very different money, because one is twice the gold of the other.
Weight
Weighed in grams on calibrated scales, in front of you. Stones do not count, and neither do clasps or fittings made of another metal, so those come off the weight.
The gold price on the day
Gold trades on a live market and the price moves every day. What we can pay you today is not what we could pay six months ago, up or down. Anyone who quotes you a fixed price per gram that never changes is not telling you the whole story.
Why we test it in front of you
Every store has an XRF machine. You put the item in, it fires x rays at it, and it reads back exactly what the metal is made of. It takes seconds and you watch it happen.
We do it that way on purpose. Gold is the one thing people worry about being done over on, and the old way of doing it, where somebody takes your chain into a back room and comes out with a number, does not build a lot of trust.
XRF also catches two things a hallmark cannot. Plated items that look like gold but are not, and unmarked items that really are gold. We have paid out plenty on bits that had no hallmark at all and would have been thrown in a drawer forever.
What about the hallmark?
A hallmark is a good start, not the final word. Older pieces, foreign pieces and anything that has been resized may have no readable mark at all. That does not mean it is worthless. Bring it in and let the machine decide.
What we buy
Chains, rings, bracelets, earrings, pendants, sovereigns and coins, and scrap. Broken, tangled, single earrings with no partner, all of it. Scrap gold is worth exactly the same per gram as pretty gold, because it goes the same way in the end.
We buy silver and platinum too, and if a piece is worth more as jewellery than as scrap, we will tell you that and pay you the higher one.
What to bring
The gold, and photo ID. We are legally required to take ID when we buy, and it protects you as much as us.
You get the price on the spot and the money the same day. No posting it off in an envelope and hoping.
And if it is a piece you are not sure about letting go, ask about Buyback. Sell it to us and you have 28 days to buy it back. It gets used a lot for family pieces where somebody needs the money now but does not want to lose it for good.
Bring it into any of our eight stores. Have it tested, get a number, and there is no obligation to sell.