How we score bullion dealers

The rubric

• Premium consistency over 30 days

  25%

  The single criterion we can measure objectively at scale. We track every dealer’s live snapshot prices on every product they carry that we have a canonical mapping for. For each dealer we compute the standard deviation of premium-over-spot per product over the trailing 30 days, then average across products. Tighter spread = higher score. A dealer that quietly creeps prices up a few percent on slow days scores lower than one whose pricing tracks spot reliably.

• BBB grade

  20%

  Better Business Bureau rating. We map A+ → 100, A → 92, B+ → 85, B → 78, C+ → 70, C → 63, D → 50, F → 30. We re-verify the grade quarterly from the dealer’s BBB profile page. We do not weight number of complaints or response rate — those are downstream signals BBB already factors in.

• Shipping speed

  15%

  Average business-day count between order placement (cleared payment) and ship date, as advertised by the dealer. ≤2 days → 100, 3–4 → 85, 5–6 → 70, 7+ → 55. We pull this from the dealer’s shipping/FAQ page; we don’t scrape order tracking.

• Return policy

  15%

  30+ days with no restocking fee → 100. 30+ days with a restocking fee → 85. 14–29 days → 70. 1–13 days → 50. No returns → 20. We read from the dealer’s posted policy.

• Payment methods

  15%

  Coverage breadth. 8+ methods → 100, 6 → 85, 4 → 70, 2 → 50. The full universe we count: bank wire, ACH, paper check, money order, credit card, debit card, crypto, PayPal, Zelle. Wire-only dealers score lower regardless of price quality.

• Customer service signal

  10%

  Qualitative score from 0–100 we set ourselves, weighted lowest because it is the most subjective. Inputs: chat / phone responsiveness in our own outreach, signal from the dealer’s public response patterns, transparency around order issues. We document the reasoning per dealer in the editorial body of each review.

Final score: weighted average → 1.0–5.0 stars, rounded to 0.1.

How often we refresh

Premium consistency runs nightly from our live snapshot data — it’s always within 24 hours. The five manually-entered criteria (BBB, shipping, returns, payment methods, customer service) we re-verify on a quarterly cadence against each dealer’s published pages, with the most recent review date stamped on every fact in the dealer’s summary box.

What we don’t score

• User-submitted reviews. We don’t pull from Trustpilot, Reseller Ratings, or any aggregator. Trustpilot scraping is against their terms. We score what we can verify ourselves.
• Affiliate commission rate. Several of these dealers pay us a commission when you click through. We disclose that on every page. The rate doesn’t affect rubric scoring — premium consistency tracks against the prices you actually see, not against the ones we negotiate.
• One-off bad anecdotes. Single bad customer-service experiences don’t move scores. Patterns documented across multiple independent sources do.

When we’re wrong

If a fact in any of our reviews is stale or wrong, email us. We re-verify within a week and the verified-on date stamp on each summary fact updates so you can see when we last looked.