I’m a golfer and I’ve spent years buying and selling things online, so at one point it seemed fairly obvious to combine the two and buy a bundle of golf equipment specifically to resell.
The experiment was successful by most of the obvious measures. I paid £1,022.03 for the bundle, eventually sold the individual pieces for a combined £1,256, and made £233.97 profit, equivalent to roughly 22.9% return on the money invested. Six of the seven items sold within two days of being listed.
On those numbers alone, the obvious conclusion would probably be to find another bundle and do it again.
I didn’t, although that wasn’t because I had decided never to sell golf clubs again. Actually breaking the bundle down and selling it taught me that the financial return is only one part of the calculation, and whether I can make money reselling golf equipment and whether a particular deal is worth doing are two different questions.
I originally recorded this experiment in two parts, first looking at what I’d bought and what I thought the equipment was worth, then following up with what actually happened when I sold it. I’ve now brought both parts together into one video showing the complete experiment from purchase to final result.
Why I Tried Flipping Golf Equipment
On paper, golf equipment looked like an obvious resale category for me because I already understood what I was looking at. I know the major manufacturers, understand the different types of equipment and have a reasonable idea why one club or specification might appeal to a different golfer from another.
That removed one of the problems with entering an unfamiliar resale category because I wasn’t trying to learn golf equipment from scratch while simultaneously learning how to sell it.
There was also an established second-hand market. Golfers regularly change drivers, irons, wedges, putters and clubs at the top of the bag, and while some want the latest equipment, plenty are perfectly happy buying something several generations old if it gives them what they need at the right price. I’ve done exactly that myself.
So I wasn’t really testing whether people bought used golf clubs. I wanted to know whether buying golf equipment as resale inventory made sense for me.
The £1,022 Golf Equipment Bundle
This wasn’t seven separate buying decisions, which is an important distinction when looking at the figures.
I bought the equipment as one bundle for £1,022.03 and then separated it into individual items to sell. The bundle contained:
- Ping G425 irons
- Ping G425 Crossover
- Ping G425 Max 5-wood
- Ping G425 Max driver
- Ping G425 Max hybrid
- Odyssey White Hot OG 1 Stroke Lab putter
- Ping DLX cart bag
When I subsequently entered the equipment into my resale records, I apportioned the £1,022.03 purchase price across the individual items based on what I thought each represented within the bundle. Those allocations were useful for bookkeeping, but they weren’t actual individual purchase prices.
I didn’t really pay £175 for the driver or £100 for the hybrid. I paid £1,022.03 for everything.
That means the useful way to judge the experiment is at bundle level. Could I buy the whole lot for £1,022.03, break it down into individual sales and recover enough money to make the complete deal worthwhile?
That was the test.
What the Golf Equipment Actually Sold For
While the individual purchase costs were only my own allocations, the selling prices are real, as are the times each item took to sell.
| Item | Sold for | Time to sell |
|---|---|---|
| Ping G425 irons | £446.00 | Less than 1 day |
| Ping G425 Crossover | £100.00 | 13 days |
| Ping G425 Max 5-wood | £130.00 | 2 days |
| Ping G425 Max driver | £209.00 | 2 days |
| Ping G425 Max hybrid | £110.00 | 2 days |
| Odyssey White Hot OG 1 putter | £126.00 | 2 days |
| Ping DLX cart bag | £135.00 | Less than 1 day |
| Total sales | £1,256.00 |
The overall calculation is therefore much more straightforward than trying to decide how much profit I made on each individual club. I paid £1,022.03 for the bundle, the combined sales produced £1,256, and the difference was £233.97, giving me a return of approximately 22.9% on the money invested.
I could create estimated profit figures for each club by allocating part of the original bundle cost to it, and that is essentially what I did in my bookkeeping, but it would create a level of precision that didn’t exist when I made the purchase.
I bought one deal, and that deal made £233.97.
The Golf Equipment Sold Much Faster Than I Expected
The speed of the sales was probably the strongest part of the experiment because six of the seven items sold within two days of being listed. The Ping irons and cart bag sold in less than a day, while the driver, 5-wood, hybrid and putter all took two days. Only the Crossover took significantly longer, and even that sold after 13 days.
Slow-moving stock therefore wasn’t the problem.
That’s worth emphasising because it would be very easy to explain my reluctance to immediately repeat the experiment by saying golf clubs were difficult to sell. They weren’t. This particular bundle sold extremely well and the market did exactly what I hoped it would do.
I Probably Could Have Sold the Clubs for More
The selling prices also need some context because I don’t think £1,256 necessarily represents the maximum amount I could have extracted from the bundle.
There was plenty of interest, particularly on Vinted. I received a lot of messages about the clubs, but that also meant dealing with a surprising number of offers that were nowhere near prices I was prepared to accept.
There were also several occasions when I accepted a reasonable offer only for the proposed buyer not to complete the purchase. I would agree to the price, expect the item to be sold, and then nothing would happen.
After enough of that, extracting every possible pound from each club became less important to me than getting the equipment sold and moving on.
Some of the eventual selling prices therefore reflected that decision. I was prepared to take a sensible price from somebody who would actually complete the transaction rather than keep holding out for the theoretical maximum while dealing with more messages, offers and buyers who might disappear.
That means there are two ways of looking at the £233.97 profit. I could probably have made more money if I had been prepared to wait longer and tolerate more of the selling process, but doing that would have required more of the very thing I was already questioning: my time and attention.
For me, that is part of the real return from a resale deal. The highest possible selling price isn’t automatically the best outcome if extracting it requires weeks of additional messages, negotiations and failed transactions.
I eventually chose certainty and completion over squeezing every last pound from the bundle.
I Made £233.97 Profit, So Was It Worth It?
If I showed somebody only the purchase and selling totals, the obvious conclusion might be that I should have immediately found another bundle. I put £1,022.03 in, got £1,256 back and sold almost everything very quickly, so why wouldn’t I repeat it?
The answer is that I wasn’t only testing whether I could buy a bundle of golf equipment and sell the individual pieces for more than I paid. I was also discovering what it was like to operate the category.
The £233.97 wasn’t payment for one simple buy-and-sell transaction. The original purchase was one transaction, but realising the value meant creating seven separate sales, each of which needed to be dealt with individually.
That is where the economics started to look slightly different.
One Bundle Became Seven Separate Sales
I bought once, but then I had to sell seven times.
The bundle had to be received and sorted, each item needed to be assessed and photographed, every piece required its own listing and somewhere to be stored until it sold, and each sale ultimately had to reach its buyer.
There was also the buyer interaction that doesn’t appear in the financial figures. Messages had to be answered, offers considered and, in some cases, accepted offers led nowhere because the buyer never completed the purchase.
None of that means the £233.97 wasn’t worthwhile. It means I can’t compare it with £233.97 profit from a single buy-and-sell transaction and pretend they are the same thing.
The number of steps required to produce the profit matters to me, particularly when I’m comparing one resale opportunity with another.
Golf Clubs Are Awkward Inventory
A golf club doesn’t look particularly large when it is sitting in your bag, but it feels considerably larger when you have a quantity of them waiting to sell.
Storage was one of the first obvious differences between golf equipment and much of the other inventory I was accustomed to handling. A golf shirt or jumper can be folded, and several pieces can occupy a relatively small storage area. Golf clubs are long, rigid objects that need somewhere sensible to live without getting damaged.
Then there is the packaging. A driver or fairway wood needs a suitable box, protection around the head and enough care that it isn’t moving around inside the package. Iron sets introduce their own packing requirements, and even the packaging materials themselves need somewhere to live before anything has sold.
The Ping DLX cart bag was an even more obvious example of the space problem.
None of this makes golf equipment impossible to sell, and businesses successfully sell and ship golf clubs every day. It simply creates friction, and for me that friction has to be compensated for somewhere in the deal.
Packing and Shipping Changed the Calculation
A resale transaction isn’t finished when somebody clicks Buy because I still have to get the product to them.
With simpler small-parcel inventory, that process can be extremely quick. An item goes into suitable packaging, the label goes on and it is ready to leave.
Golf clubs ask more of me. I need suitable packaging, I need to protect the clubhead and shaft, I need to deal with a much longer parcel, and I need somewhere to keep the boxes and packing materials required to do all of that.
Individually, none of those things is a major problem. Repeated across several sales, however, they become part of the economics.
That’s why the useful question for me isn’t simply how much profit is in the bundle? I also want to know how much work I will have to do to realise that profit.
Buying a Bundle Changes How I Think About Individual Clubs
There was another useful lesson from buying everything together, which is that not every individual item in a bundle has to be a brilliant deal.
If I buy seven clubs separately, I can judge every purchase individually because I know exactly what I paid for each one and can decide whether the likely selling price gives me enough margin.
A bundle is different.
One item might perform better than I expected, another might disappoint, one might recover a substantial part of my original investment and another might contribute relatively little. What matters is whether the combined proceeds justify the combined purchase price and the work required to separate and sell everything.
That’s why I don’t think the individual profit figures I originally allocated to these clubs are particularly useful when analysing the experiment now. The bundle was the deal, and the individual items were how I realised the value from it.
Profit Isn’t the Only Number That Matters
This experiment reinforced something I had already started to understand from selling other physical products. Profit has to be considered alongside the work required to produce it.
£233.97 is £233.97, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I also had more than £1,000 tied up in the original purchase and had to turn one acquisition into seven individual sales to realise that return.
In this case the capital came back remarkably quickly because most of the equipment sold almost immediately, which was an excellent result. A future bundle might not behave like that.
If two or three of the higher-value pieces took several months to sell, exactly the same apparent margin could feel very different.
The same applies to the selling price. I can usually ask for more and wait longer, but the extra money only matters if I think the additional time and attention required to get it are worthwhile. In this experiment I deliberately accepted that I might leave some money on the table in exchange for completing the sales and moving on.
For me, the complete calculation has to include money, time, storage and attention rather than simply the percentage return shown on a spreadsheet.
Knowing Golf Equipment Helped, But It Didn’t Remove the Work
Product knowledge definitely helped because I wasn’t trying to understand an unfamiliar category from scratch. Knowing golf equipment helped me recognise what I was buying and gave me confidence that there was a market for the individual pieces.
But knowing whether a Ping driver is desirable doesn’t make the parcel any shorter. Knowing what an iron set is worth doesn’t make it occupy less storage space, and knowing the difference between two shafts doesn’t make the packaging disappear.
Expertise can improve my buying decisions, help with pricing and reduce the chance of buying the wrong stock, but it cannot remove the physical characteristics of the product.
That distinction ultimately mattered more than I expected.
The Experiment Passed Most of the Obvious Tests
This is why I don’t regard the experiment as a failure. Calling it one would actually make the lesson less useful.
There was clearly demand, because six of the seven items sold within two days. There was profit, because the £1,022.03 bundle produced £1,256 in sales and £233.97 profit. The capital came back, because everything eventually sold, and I already had enough product knowledge to understand the category.
There was probably even some additional margin available if I had been willing to wait longer and deal with more negotiation.
The part that didn’t immediately convince me was the operational model.
The return wasn’t attractive enough for me to automatically turn one successful bundle into a larger golf-club resale operation. That’s a much narrower conclusion than saying golf clubs aren’t worth selling, because my own figures show quite clearly that they can be.
Why I Didn’t Immediately Buy Another £1,000 Bundle
Once I had worked through the complete process, I chose not to immediately repeat it.
That wasn’t a permanent decision never to sell golf clubs again. It was a decision not to assume that one profitable bundle automatically meant I should build a business around doing the same thing repeatedly.
I prefer lower-friction inventory where the relationship between profit and the work required to produce it makes sense for me. Someone with more storage, ready access to golf-club shipping boxes, favourable courier arrangements and a system designed specifically around golf equipment could reach a completely different conclusion.
A specialist golf retailer already has much of the infrastructure that I found irritating, and that matters.
I’m not saying golf clubs are a bad resale category because my own results would make that claim difficult to defend. I’m saying that if I buy golf equipment commercially, the deal has to be good enough to compensate for the additional storage, packing, handling, buyer interaction and capital involved.
That leaves the door open. It simply raises the standard a future opportunity has to meet.
Buying and Selling My Own Golf Clubs Is Different
I have continued buying and selling used golf clubs for my own game, and How I Rebuilt My Golf Bag With Second-Hand Golf Clubs is a good example of how differently I approach those purchases.
I bought a set of Mizuno MP-64 irons for £163.08, tested them and eventually sold them on Vinted for £240, producing a £76.92 profit. I also bought a TaylorMade M2 driver for £130.08, discovered that it wasn’t right for me and subsequently sold it for £130, meaning that experiment cost me eight pence.
Another unusual set of MP-64s was bought as an experiment and returned when the golf told me they weren’t right.
Those transactions are different because I’m buying equipment primarily because I want to use it. The second-hand market then gives me a relatively low-risk way of testing different clubs and recovering much of the money when something doesn’t work.
If I happen to make a profit along the way, that’s welcome, but the original reason for buying is different.
It also means I continue to see the second-hand golf market from both sides, and that experience could quite reasonably lead to me selling more golf equipment commercially in the future. The difference is that I now have a much better idea of what the opportunity needs to look like before I consider it worthwhile.
What Would Make Me Buy Another Golf Equipment Bundle?
I wouldn’t rule it out.
The original experiment gave me evidence that demand exists and that I can buy and sell golf equipment profitably, so if I found the right bundle at the right price I would still consider it.
I would be more selective, though.
I’d want enough potential cash profit to compensate for breaking the bundle into separate sales, and I’d favour equipment I understood and knew had an active second-hand market. I’d think about storage and packaging before buying rather than after something had sold, consider how much capital I was tying up and look at how many separate transactions would be required to realise the expected profit.
I’d also think more carefully about the type of buyer attention likely to come with the stock. Lots of messages can indicate strong demand, but that doesn’t make every message valuable, and an accepted offer isn’t a sale until somebody actually pays.
Most importantly, I’d ask whether the deal still looked attractive after accounting for all of that.
The lesson from the £1,022 bundle isn’t that I shouldn’t buy another one. It’s that £1,000 in and £1,250 out isn’t automatically enough information to make the decision.
I need to know what sits between those two numbers.
What I Would Consider Before Flipping Golf Clubs
If another golfer asked me whether they should try reselling golf clubs, I wouldn’t automatically tell them yes or no.
I’d want to know whether they could buy the bundle cheaply enough, whether they understood what was actually in it and how much the individual pieces could realistically sell for. I’d also consider how many separate listings the bundle would create, how quickly the desirable equipment was likely to move and what might happen to the weaker pieces.
Then there are the practical questions around storage, packaging and shipping, along with how much money will remain tied up while the bundle is being worked through. I would also allow for the time involved in answering questions, considering offers and dealing with buyers who may express plenty of interest without ever completing a purchase.
Ultimately, the question I would ask is:
Is the total likely profit enough to compensate me for turning one purchase into all of those individual sales?
For me, that is a much more useful question than looking at an estimated margin on one club inside a bundle.
Was Flipping £1,000 of Golf Equipment Worth It?
I paid £1,022.03 for one bundle of golf equipment, broke it down into seven individual sales and eventually received £1,256, leaving an overall profit of £233.97. Six of the seven items sold within two days, and I believe I could probably have achieved a higher total selling price if I had been willing to wait longer and deal with more negotiation.
By most obvious measures, the experiment worked.
Was it worth doing?
Yes, I think it was.
Not simply because it made £233.97, but because it gave me evidence.
I learned that good used golf equipment can sell very quickly, that buying a bundle can create an opportunity even when it doesn’t make sense to judge every item as a separate flip, and that my knowledge of golf gives me a useful advantage when assessing the equipment.
I also learned that strong buyer interest doesn’t always translate neatly into completed sales, and that storage, packaging, handling, negotiation and the number of individual transactions required can make a profitable bundle less attractive than the headline numbers suggest.
None of that tells me never to do it again. It tells me what I need to see before I do.
The stock has to be right, the buying price has to be right, the likely total selling value has to be right, and the profit has to justify the work required to turn one bundle into cash.
For me, that was a useful £1,000 experiment.
