Buying gold from the public: what to ask, what to weigh, what to pay

Old gold is one of the most profitable lines a small jeweler can run, and one of the easiest to fumble. Done well, a buy-back takes ten calm minutes, leaves the customer feeling fairly treated, and turns into a stock or scrap entry by the end of the day. Done badly, it's an awkward conversation, a price pulled out of thin air, and a paper trail nobody wants to look for six months later. The difference is almost never about the metal. It's about the routine.

Below is the counter routine we recommend to Gem Logic customers when a member of the public walks in with a chain, a broken ring, or a shoebox of inherited pieces. It works the same in any country, in any currency, and at any gold price.

Before anything goes on the scale

The first two minutes are not about the gold. They are about the seller and what they actually want. A few short questions reframe the whole conversation and prevent the most common mistakes:

• Are you sure you want to sell? Some pieces have sentimental value the customer hasn't fully thought through. Asking out loud protects them and you.
• Where is the piece from? Inherited, your own, a gift, a workshop leftover. You are not interrogating, you are establishing provenance for your own records.
• Are you looking for cash, store credit, or a trade-in toward a new piece? A trade-in is almost always worth more to the customer and more to you. Lead with it when it makes sense.
• Do you have ID with you? Better to find out now than after you've made an offer and the deal stalls at paperwork.

Two minutes of conversation here saves twenty minutes of friction later, and quietly tells the customer they have walked into a serious shop, not a pawn counter.

Test, then weigh, in that order

Always test before you weigh. A weight on a piece of unknown purity is a number with no meaning, and customers can tell when you are guessing.

• Look first. Hallmark, stamp, country mark, maker's mark. A magnifying loupe and a clean cloth are all you need. If a piece has no mark and the customer doesn't know its purity, treat it as unknown until proven otherwise.
• Acid or electronic test for anything unmarked or doubtful. Test in a discreet spot. If it fails, say so plainly and offer to test the next piece, never argue.
• Separate before weighing. Group by purity (9k, 14k, 18k, 22k, 24k) and by metal. Mixed weighing is the single biggest source of pricing errors.
• Remove non-gold parts. Spring rings, clasps in steel, stones in their settings. Either deduct an estimated weight or, for higher-value pieces, take the stones out before you weigh.
• Use a calibrated scale, in front of the customer. A 0.01 g precision scale on the counter, zeroed before each item, is non-negotiable. Let them see the number.

A fair, repeatable pricing formula

The customer doesn't need to know your margin. They need to feel that the offer would have been the same if their cousin had walked in five minutes earlier. That feeling comes from a formula you actually use, every time.

For each line on the offer:

1. Start from today's spot price for the metal, not last week's price you happen to remember.
2. Convert spot to a price per gram for the actual purity of the piece (18k is 75% pure, 14k is 58.3%, 9k is 37.5%, and so on).
3. Apply your buy-back margin. This covers refining, financing, the risk of a bad piece, and your time. Set it once per metal, then leave it alone.
4. Round up the total to a clean number. A €1,864.62 offer becomes €1,870. Customers remember the gesture more than the cents.

In Gem Logic, the buy-back screen runs this formula automatically. You pick the metal, weigh the piece, and the line is priced from the live spot rate and your per-metal margin. A workspace setting can round the total up so your staff never have to calculate anything in their head at the counter.

Show the breakdown to the customer. Weight, purity, spot, your margin, total. Transparency is what makes the offer feel fair, even when the number itself is lower than they hoped.

Document the deal as if you'll have to defend it

Buy-back rules differ from country to country, and they change. Treat the local law as the floor, not the ceiling. As a working principle, every buy-back you make from the public should produce, on the day, a single record that contains:

• The seller's identity, captured from a photo of an official ID, not just typed in.
• A description of every piece, with weight, purity, and a photograph.
• The price paid per line and in total, with the spot rate used.
• The payment method (cash, transfer, store credit) and the date.
• Both signatures, seller and buyer.
• A holding period before the goods leave the shop or get melted, so the record can be reconciled if a question is raised.

In practice, this is the part where most jewelers slip. Paper forms get filed somewhere, photos live on a phone, and the customer record is created from memory two days later. By the time anyone needs to find the deal, the trail is already cold.

Gem Logic turns the documentation into the workflow itself. The ID is photographed onto the contact, the signatures are captured on a tablet at the counter, the police book entry is generated from the same record, and the whole thing is searchable forever. Nothing is written twice, nothing is filed loose, and the routine is identical for every member of staff.

Resell or scrap, decide on the day

Once a piece is paid for and documented, you have two paths. Wearable, on-trend pieces in good condition belong in your second-hand display, where the markup is far higher than the scrap value. Worn, broken, or out-of-fashion pieces go to the refiner.

The mistake is leaving the decision for "later". Pieces that sit unsorted on a tray for three weeks become a guessing game by the end of the month. Decide on the day, and route each piece into the right bucket immediately. Resellable pieces become inventory items with a SKU and a photograph. Scrap pieces are bagged, labelled with the purchase reference, and weighed in a refiner batch you can reconcile later.

The same inventory discipline that runs your new stock should run your buy-back stock. One catalog, one reporting view, one source of truth.

Calm, fair, documented

Customers who sell to you are paying close attention. They watch the scale, they watch the screen, they watch how unhurried you are. A confident, transparent routine turns a one-off transaction into a story they tell three friends. That, more than the gold itself, is what makes buy-back a long-term line for the shop.