How Caddence Works
How we collect, link, and present UK golf equipment prices. Short version: we check 40+ UK golf retailers every day, link the same product across stores, attach editorial detail where we have it, and show the cheapest current price alongside the full price history. No retailer pays us to rank higher.
Where the data comes from
Every day we collect product listings, prices, and stock indicators from 40+ UK golf retailers. The list spans national chains, regional pros, and used-club specialists. Each daily update captures the current price, available variants (shaft, flex, hand, loft), and whether the retailer is showing the product as in stock.
We don't pull from auction sites, listings without a fixed price, or retailers selling outside the UK.
Pipeline cadence is every 24 hours. A price displayed on Caddence is at most one day old. Stock indicators are reliable but can lag a retailer's checkout by up to a day, so treat them as a guide, not a guarantee.
How we match the same product across stores
This is the hard part. The same driver might be listed as "TaylorMade Stealth 2 9° Stiff" on one site, "Stealth2 Driver 9 Stiff Ventus" on another, and "TM Stealth 2 9 degree" on a third. Out of the box, those look like three different products.
We run every listing through a four-tier matching engine:
- Barcode (GTIN). When the retailer publishes a real barcode, we match on it. Exact, fast, no ambiguity.
- PKG canonical key. We maintain a curated Product Knowledge Graph of canonical golf products (brand, model, year, type, variant) and match each normalised listing against it.
- PKG alias. Learned alternate names for a canonical product catch the retailer-specific phrasings.
- LLM-assisted linking with human review. For the unmatched remainder, a language model proposes a match; confident matches are auto-accepted, uncertain ones enter a human review queue before being promoted.
Roughly 78% of all listings are linked deterministically before the LLM step ever runs; the LLM and review queue handle the rest, taking model-name coverage to 99.7%. Match decisions are logged, auditable, and reversible.
What sits on top of the price data
Editorial coverage describes what the club is, who it suits, and where it fits in the brand's range. It's overlaid on the price data for products where we have it: specs, pros and cons, target player profile, key technologies, and competitor comparisons. Editorial is clearly distinguished from raw price data, and specs are sourced from manufacturer data and reputable reviewers (MyGolfSpy, Today's Golfer, manufacturer spec sheets).
Price history
Every product carries a full price history across every retailer we track. That history is what makes "is this actually a deal?" answerable. If the £80-off banner on a driver is the lowest it's been all year, the chart shows it. If it's the same price the same retailer sold it for three weeks ago, the chart shows that too.
Out-of-stock products stay visible
We never hide out-of-stock products; they're the pricing-intelligence moat. A listing carries one of three states: temporarily out of stock (expected back), discontinued (gone for good but still useful for price comparison and history), or dead (the retailer dropped the listing entirely). You still see the price the product last sold at and where.
How rankings work
On every product page, retailers are ranked by current price, cheapest first. That's the whole algorithm. Some retailers have affiliate relationships with us; most don't. Affiliate status does not affect ranking, placement, or display priority. The cheapest price wins, even when it costs us the commission.
What we never do
- No paid ranking. We don't accept payment for higher placement, sponsored slots, or removal of competitor listings.
- No estimated prices. Every price is a real, recorded figure from a real retailer listing, never modelled, inferred, or guessed.
- No selling your email. Price alerts use your email to send the alert and nothing else. Unsubscribe nukes your data.
How we fix errors
Mislabeled products, missing retailers, broken matches, pricing bugs: email hello@caddence.golf. We read everything and most fixes ship within a day or two. Confirmed errors are corrected on the next pipeline run.