Hatton Garden Metals

We are proud to announce that Money Saving Experts website has voted Hatton Garden Metals the number one postal gold company in the UK.

After many trials using pawnbrokers, scrap gold postal companies and high street jewellers Hatton Garden Metals came out on top.

Take a look at MSE tests below.

MSE’s undercover gold investigation.

To test how much cash you can get for gold, we sent MSE bling princess Jenny undercover to expose the lucrative business of gold buying.

We bought £100 of second-hand gold and posed as a gold seller at gold websites, pawn brokers and jewellers in a famous London’s jewellery district. Our investigation found offers ranged from £24 for the worst to £109 for the best.

Read the MSE Gold investigation story below.

To test how much cash you can get for gold, Martin gave me an £100 budget and told me to grab as much jewellery as possible. It’s not often get to buy accessories with the office credit card, so I wasn’t about to say no.

I grabbed 11.6 grams of gold from ebay: 3 rings, a heart charm, four earrings and two broken chains – all nine carat. Now I just needed to score a fair price.

Test 1. Jewellers. Best offer £100

It was off to London’s Hatton Garden district to hawk my bag o’ bling. I posed as a unsuspecting shopper at a busy jewellers on the main drag, muttering “Erm I’m not sure what carat it is ... what’s a hallmark?”.

The jeweller plonked my gold on the scales, declared it 11.6 grams of 9 carat and offered £75. I showed a print-out from a postal gold quote which offered £100, but he stuck firm. “Pah! Those gold sites never pay what they say.”

The next bloke upped it to £80. I was unimpressed, and concerned Martin might dock £20 from my pay to cover the loss. Scrap metal buyer Do-By 925, a few yards further on, offerered £95. That was more like it.

But I pressed on to a back-street shop piled high with thousands of gold trinkets, where I was offered £90. When I told the jeweller others were talking £95, he leant in cheerfully, “Okay love, I’ll tell you where you can get £100, if you buy me a drink with the difference. Go round the back, and down the steps and look for Lois.”

Suspecting I was close to infiltrating London’s gold underworld, I found myself in a dark corridor with bullet-proof steel door. Vinnie Jones could have popped out any time. But the door clicked open and the kid behind the counter offered £100 – result!

Verdict:

Jewellers are a decent option for folks in London and Birmingham, who have access to hyper-competitive jewellery quarters. If you do live near, consider doing it in person, if only to avoid the hassle and risk of posting

A top tip is to get matey with jeweller – he might just tell you who he sells his scrap gold to in the local area, ie, the top payer.

Test 2. Pawnbrokers. Best offer £70

No such rich pickings at pawnbrokers. Most pawn shops buy gold permanently, not just for pawning, but have fatter profit margins than jewellers.

H&T Pawnbrokers on Hammersmith High Street offered £65 for my treasures, raising it to £70, after some haggling. “It’s only scrap though, so you won’t get that much for it,” he said. I politely told him to get knotted.

The final stop was national chain the Money Shop. A woman suggested £64, which I declined so she offered £70.

Verdict:

Pawn brokers aren’t known as consumers’ best friends, so it was unsurprising they work on a much higher margin.

Test 3. Postal gold. Best offer £110

Sure enough, the chat forum was full of angry stories from people who’d seen a telly advert and got cheque for a fraction of gold’s worth.

But some happy stories became slowly visible among the angry posts. Lots of people were pleased with how much they got, and most had used postal site Hatton Garden Metals.

Gold comparison site Comparethegoldmarket.com showed the cheapest Postgold.co.uk would have paid £23.60 for my treasures and Money4Gold £59. The Hatton Garden Metals’ calculator predicted it would give £112 for my stash, beating even the top jewellers.

The bling was posted special delivery, with a home address (no mention of MoneySavingExpert). The next day a cheque arrived for £109.78 and cleared.

Verdict. When I first researched postal gold sites, I expected the industry to be dodgier than Tony Soprano’s waste management business. But I was impressed, and even made an fiver return on my initial £100 budget (a tenner minus £5 postage).

Compare postal gold sites

There’s a way to benchmark other gold sites. Normal comparison sites zip your requirements to different gold firms, scraping their data off the screens to report back the cheapest, but Comparethegoldmarket works differently.

Gold sites sneakily pay less than they initially promise on their websites, so Comparethegold market anonymously posts bags of gold out to a host of postal gold sites each month and records the actual offers it gets.MSE have not tested all of these sites and sent gold to them ourselves, but this is a good way to check you’re still getting the best deal.

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