You have found five gold buyers. They all speak of expertise, they all know the gold price, they can all quote you a figure. Yet they do not practise the same trade. And that is exactly where your money is at stake.
You have found five gold buyers. They all have a website, they all speak of expertise, they all know the gold price, several display a spectrometer or density meter, a scale, perhaps even a furnace. They can all quote you a price.
Yet they do not necessarily practise the same trade.
One will collect your gold before selling it on. Another will bundle it with other lots. A third will have it melted elsewhere. Yet another can melt it himself without knowing how to refine it. Another still will tell you to wait a fortnight for your ingot to be appraised, the time it takes to send it to a real refinery. And at the end of the chain stands the one who truly masters the metal: analysis, melting, refining, control and production.
So before asking « how much will you give me? », ask the other question: « what happens to my gold after I sell it to you? ». The answer will often tell you far more than the price displayed in the window, which is not always the one you find at the bottom of the invoice.
Eight trades behind the same shopfront
Nobody tells you this, because the industry has no interest in your knowing it: between the jewellery you sell and the ingot that will come out of it, there is a chain of trades, and every link takes its margin out of your price.
The buyback office collects your gold and sells it on: its margin lives between what it announces to you and what it will obtain. The broker puts parties in touch and takes a commission on the way. The wholesale dealer bundles the lots of the previous ones. The wholesale melter melts, but does not know how to refine. The manufacturer transforms. The foundry casts. The refinery refines and turns the metal into ingots, but does not receive private individuals: it deals with institutions, trading floors, brokers and professionals. Quantities are a selection criterion there, and you are not part of it. And at the very end, the integrated refinery does all of this under one roof: it buys your gold, analyses it, melts, refines, controls, manufactures and sells you pure gold directly.
None of these trades is dishonest. They are simply not the same trade. And one rule suffers no exception: the more links there are between you and the melt, the more margins are stacked between you and your money. Selling to the first link means paying the whole chain. Selling to the last means paying none of it.
The test comes down to one question, always the same: « what happens to my gold after you? ». The one who answers « I sell it on » is an intermediary. The one who answers « it leaves to be melted elsewhere » is another. The one who can answer « it goes down to the laboratory, it is melted, refined, assayed by spectrometry and recast as an ingot under our own brand » is an integrated refinery. At Gold & Silver Company, that answer can be visited: it is our building in Dottignies (Mouscron), and the appraisal there is free, filmed and without appointment.
Your best buyer is not necessarily the closest one
For decades, selling your gold was a geographical decision. People looked for the nearest address, and it was logical: it seemed absurd to travel miles without knowing the prices. In 2026, that reasoning is no longer always rational, and it is refuted by a single multiplication.
Take a deliberately simple example. You own 200 grams of metal falling under the same rate. A professional in Bordeaux offers you 70 euros per gram. Another, further away, 85 euros net. The difference appears to be 15 euros. It is actually 3,000 euros.
A 40 euro return flight then represents 1.33% of the differential. Add a taxi, a meal, even a night in a hotel: the order of magnitude does not move. The right question is therefore no longer « how much does this trip cost? » but « how much does not travelling cost me? ». In this example, staying in Bordeaux costs nearly 3,000 euros. It is the most expensive journey you can make without leaving your city.
And for ten grams? The same honesty
For 10 grams, the same gap of 15 euros per gram represents 150 euros, and crossing France for that single operation would generally make no economic sense. That is precisely why a serious professional should never systematically recommend the journey.
For modest quantities, a remote shipping procedure, when it suits the file, avoids a pointless trip: a registered parcel with declared value costs around fifteen euros and captures the same price gap, 150 euros more in our example, without leaving home. For an estate, several hundred grams, a set of coins, signed jewellery, stones or a complex holding, it is the other way round: the cost of a wrong choice can far exceed the cost of the journey, and the trip, or the personalised file we open from one kilo of gold, becomes the obvious answer again.
The house doctrine holds in one sentence: the right distance is not the one separating your home from the professional, it is the one separating the two net offers. We do not want to be the professional closest to your home. We want to be the one for whom distance stops being the most important criterion. The catchment area of a refinery is not measured in kilometres, it is measured in value differential.
Compare, now, with your own figures
The reasoning is simple, and so are your figures: the net price gap per gram, multiplied by your weight, compared with the cost of the trip or the parcel. To do it properly, the house has published its complete method for comparing offers, the six checks that precede any calculation, and a calculator plugged into our buyback grid currently in force. Your net prices are public and updated continuously.
And if you prefer to start at the beginning: come and see what becomes of gold after us. It is the only question that matters, and we are one of the rare houses in Europe where the answer is given as a visit rather than a promise.