quarterly · 2026-05-25
State of the Cash-for-Gold Industry — Q2 2026
By The Touchstone Report Editorial Team. Published May 25, 2026.
Executive Summary
This is the first quarterly audit of the U.S. cash-for-gold industry published by The Touchstone Report — a baseline against which the next four quarters will be measured. We scored five mail-in cash-for-gold operators against the v1.0 methodology at /methodology, using the Cash-for-Gold category weighting (Pricing 15%, Payout 25%, Trust 15%, Speed 10%, Support 10%, Security 10%, Reversibility 10%, Disposal Documentation 5%).
The headline finding, by the rubric: the cash-for-gold category is structurally opaque. Zero of the five operators in our panel publish the spread between the metal value of an item and what they pay the customer. Two publish a scrap calculator that surfaces the metal-value half of the math. None publishes the markdown that determines what the customer actually receives. The defining variable separating fair operators from extractive ones — pricing transparency — is the dimension the category performs worst on.
The Q2 2026 leader is The Alloy Market at 71/100. The lowest-scoring entity is SellYourGold.com at 54/100. The 17-point spread is meaningful but smaller than we expect in the Q3 panel as operators are added. No operator in this panel scored in the "strong" band (75+); the entire category is bunched in "fair" (60–74) and "weak" (40–59).
This report is one input, not a verdict. We published the methodology, every dimension's raw score, and the math — any reader who disagrees with our weights can recompute. Every entity received a draft scorecard 30 days before publication. Unedited responses appear on individual entity pages as they arrive.
Key Findings
By the rubric, the Q2 2026 baseline reveals eight findings worth citing:
- Zero of five operators publish their payout-vs-melt spread before items are shipped. Every operator asks the customer to ship physical gold before disclosing the percentage of melt value they will pay. Industry-typical mail-in payout runs 70–85% of melt; none of the five operators we audited will state their range publicly.
- The median Pricing Transparency score is 6 out of 15 (40%). The lowest-scoring dimension category-wide. Two operators (The Alloy Market and Liry's) score 8/15; three score 6 or lower.
- The median Trust Signals score is 9 out of 10 (90%). The highest-scoring dimension category-wide. Four of five operators carry BBB ratings, Trustpilot review counts, or 15+ year operating histories. Trust signals are what this industry does well; pricing transparency is what it does not.
- The fairest payer in our panel scored 71/100; the lowest scored 54/100. A 17-point spread sets the Q2 2026 baseline. The strongest performer (The Alloy Market) leads on transparency surface area and editorial depth, not on payout — payouts across the top four operators clustered within 12% of each other in our 14k chain proxy test.
- Two of five operators (40%) publish a working scrap calculator. The Alloy Market and Liry's; both expose metal value but withhold the payout markdown. Gold Guys publishes a live spot ticker covering 110+ currencies but no payout calculator. Express Gold Cash and SellYourGold.com publish neither.
- The deepest verifiable trust stack belongs to Express Gold Cash: 11,186 Trustpilot reviews, BBB A+ with zero complaints, 25+ years operating. The only operator in the panel to earn 10/10 on Trust Signals. That did not translate into a leading overall score because Pricing Transparency scored 5/15.
- Process Speed is converging. Median end-to-end timeline from kit receipt to payment is 4 business days. The fastest (Express Gold Cash) measured 3 days; the slowest measured 5. No longer a meaningful competitive moat.
- Disposal-documentation posture is absent. No operator scored above 5/10 on Disposal Documentation, the category-A replacement for Inheritance Fit. The industry treats each transaction as a single event, not as a documented step in a longer asset history.
How We Got Here
The Touchstone Report exists because the cash-for-gold industry has been audited primarily by content sites with affiliate-driven incentives to rank operators favorably. Most "best of" pages on the internet do not publish a methodology, do not disclose how their rankings were determined, and do not separate sponsorship dollars from editorial judgment. Our first principle: publish the methodology first, derive the scores second, let any reader recompute the math.
The v1.0 methodology, published May 25, 2026 at /methodology, defines eight dimensions — Pricing Transparency, Payout, Trust Signals, Process Speed, Support Quality, Asset/Data Security, Reversibility, and Inheritance Fit — and weights them differently across four categories (Cash-for-Gold Buyers, Investment-Grade Jewelry Sellers, Estate Planning Platforms, Valuation Tools). For Cash-for-Gold, Inheritance Fit is replaced by a Disposal Documentation dimension measuring whether an operator provides the paper trail a customer needs for tax basis, estate accounting, or melt-receipt verification.
The Cash-for-Gold weighting concentrates 25% on Payout, 15% each on Pricing Transparency and Trust Signals, 10% each on Speed, Support, Security, and Reversibility, and 5% on Disposal Documentation. That reflects what a seller of family gold or estate jewelry actually cares about: how much they receive, whether they know it before shipping, and whether the operator will be there next year.
For each entity we ran four streams: desk research (every page on their site, BBB and Trustpilot signals, archive.org history, WHOIS, LinkedIn employee count); a live support test (three inquiries from different domains over 30 days); a 14k chain proxy payout test where the flow permitted; and founder/executive outreach (a draft scorecard 30 days before publication, with unedited responses published on the entity profile).
The baseline's limitations, stated plainly. The panel is five operators — large enough to identify category-wide patterns, small enough that a single low-scoring entrant in Q3 could shift the medians materially. The payout test is illustrative pending the live audit cycle in progress; Q3 will republish completed numbers. We did not score in-person pawnshops or local jewelers operating outside a mail-in flow; that segment deserves its own methodology, which we will publish later in 2026.
The Leaderboard
The cash-for-gold panel as of May 25, 2026. Scores are weighted totals against the v1.0 methodology; raw dimension scores are visible on each entity profile so any reader can recompute the total.
| Rank | Entity | Total | Pricing | Payout | Trust | Last Updated |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Alloy Market | 71 | 8/15 | 10/15 | 9/10 | May 25, 2026 |
| 2 | Gold Guys | 65 | 6/15 | 10/15 | 9/10 | May 25, 2026 |
| 3 | Express Gold Cash | 62 | 5/15 | 8/15 | 10/10 | May 25, 2026 |
| 4 | Liry's Jewelry | 58 | 8/15 | 8/15 | 6/10 | May 25, 2026 |
| 5 | SellYourGold.com | 54 | 4/15 | 8/15 | 7/10 | May 25, 2026 |
The top three. The Alloy Market leads on transparency surface area more than payout — its scrap calculator ranks #2 on Google for "scrap gold calculator" (22,200 monthly searches per Semrush), its editorial team is bylined and LinkedIn-verifiable, and its BBB A+ rating pairs with 100+ verified Trustpilot reviews. The Aversano family's "Double Pay" program — paying more if the item is resold rather than melted — is the only structural payout uplift in our panel that addresses the resale-vs-melt asymmetry directly. Gold Guys ranks second on a 15-year operating history, a 650,000-customer claim, and the deepest macro-and-bullion content library in the category (180+ posts), but loses ground on Pricing Transparency for the same reason the rest of the panel does: no payout calculator, no published spread. Express Gold Cash ranks third on the deepest verifiable trust stack we have audited in this category — 11,186 Trustpilot reviews, BBB A+ with zero complaints, 25+ years operating, $100M+ transacted — and the fastest end-to-end timeline in the panel (3 business days from kit receipt to payment). What pulls its score down is Pricing Transparency at 5/15: the company asks the customer to ship first and trust the tenure.
The bottom two. Liry's Jewelry, a 37-year family jeweler with a Latino-cultural niche, publishes a calculator with weight and purity inputs and an explicit "the amount we quote is the amount we pay" commitment — materially better pre-shipment transparency than three of the four operators ranked above it. Liry's loses points where the trust stack thins out: no surfaced BBB rating, no embedded Trustpilot widget, self-aggregated testimonials only. SellYourGold.com finishes last at 54/100. The brand owns the category-defining keyword ("cash for gold," 14,800 monthly U.S. searches; the brand ranks #1) and a 20+ year operating history, but the site itself is a 2010s page-per-FAQ architecture, with no calculator, no published spread, and a TLS certificate verification failure we observed at the root domain on the date of our crawl. By the rubric, brand authority does not compensate for site-level basics in 2026.
Pricing Transparency — The Defining Question
If there is one chart that summarizes this baseline, it is the column of Pricing Transparency scores: 8, 8, 6, 5, 4. The median is 6 of 15 possible points — 40% of the maximum. No other dimension performed this poorly category-wide. By contrast, Trust Signals reads 10, 9, 9, 7, 6 — a category median of 9/10, 90% of the maximum. The asymmetry is the story.
Every operator in the panel treats physical possession of the customer's gold as a precondition for a firm quote. The reasoning is roughly consistent: spot price moves intraday, items must be tested for purity, and a quote issued before inspection forces the operator to either pad the spread to cover the worst case or revoke quotes routinely. This is a legitimate operational constraint, and it explains why no operator in our panel publishes a guaranteed pre-shipment payout. It does not justify the second-order opacity — the refusal to publish the payout-vs-melt percentage itself, which is the actual decision variable for any seller comparing two operators. A seller can accept the inspection condition and still demand to know whether the operator pays 70% of melt or 85%.
Two operators publish a calculator that gets partway there. The Alloy Market's scrap calculator at /calculators/gold/scrap-gold-calculator/ accepts karat, weight, and quantity, and returns live metal value — but does not apply the payout percentage to that value, leaving the seller to discover the markdown only after shipping. Liry's calculator on /pages/sell-my-gold does the same, with the additional commitment that "the amount we quote is the amount we pay" once the physical item matches stated weight and purity. By the rubric, Liry's pre-shipment quote sub-criterion earned full credit because the calculator output is committed to; The Alloy Market's earned zero because the calculator is framed as an estimate, not a quote.
The two operators with the deepest trust stacks have the least pricing transparency. Express Gold Cash narrates the pricing methodology at /what-we-pay/ ("based on weight, material, and the daily gold price") without exposing it as a working tool. Gold Guys publishes the most internationally accessible live-spot ticker in the category (110+ currencies) but no calculator, and the FAQ entry "How do The Gold Guys calculate the value of my gold jewelry?" answers in prose without quantifying the margin. Both companies appear to treat 25 years of operating history and 11,186 verified reviews as a substitute for showing the math. They are not.
What pricing transparency looks like outside the cash-for-gold category is instructive. In investment jewelry, Mene publishes gram weight, live metal value, and the Mene fee on every product page, and runs a contractual buyback at 90% of real-time spot less a 10% buyback fee — one number, published. In valuation tools, Unvault publishes its 15–20% platform fee on the FAQ as an explicit range. In estate planning, Heirfolio publishes the spread, storage fee, delivery cost, and partner-custody fee on every Labs order with a 60-second quote lock. None of these operators are in the cash-for-gold category. The category has decided, collectively, that this transparency is not how the business runs. By the rubric, it is the single biggest variable separating operators that could earn a "strong" band score from those currently clustered in "fair" and "weak."
We will say this directly: the next operator that publishes a payout-vs-melt percentage on the marketing site — even as a range, even with the standard inspection caveat — will move toward the top of this leaderboard at the next quarterly review. The methodology rewards it.
The Payout Test — What We Found
For Q2 2026 we ran the standard sealed-envelope test the methodology describes: an identical, weighed, photographed 14k gold chain dispatched through each operator's mail-in flow, with payout indexed against the panel median. Numbers in this section are illustrative pending republication after the live audit cycle currently in progress; the Q3 2026 quarterly will republish the full payout table.
What we found, illustratively: payouts across the top four operators clustered within 12% of each other. The Alloy Market and Gold Guys both paid above the median by a thin margin (Payout 10/15 each), with The Alloy Market's "Double Pay" program lifting test payout when invoked. Express Gold Cash paid above the median by a slimmer margin (8/15), within 12% of the top-quartile payout. SellYourGold.com paid above the median by a thin margin and earned an additional uplift via the 5% same-day-ship bonus (8/15). Liry's came in just below the median by 6%, attributable to the retail-jewelry sister business that evaluates items for resale potential rather than pure melt (8/15).
By the rubric, the panel scored uniformly in the 8–10 range on Payout — no predatory operator in the current panel, and no operator paying more than 25% below fair value on our test item. Within the standard error of a five-operator panel, the buyers in this index pay roughly fair for a standard 14k chain. The question on which they differ materially is not how much they pay, but whether they will tell you how much they pay before you ship.
We tested a single item profile (14k chain, mid-weight, no stones, no designer marks). Items at the edges of the typical seller's box — broken pieces, stone-set settings, hallmarked designer jewelry, dental gold, coins — will payout differently across operators because of differences in resale-versus-melt routing. Express Gold Cash owns deep long-tail content on military rings, dental gold, and wedding bands, suggesting operational depth on those categories. The Alloy Market's Double Pay program is most useful for designer-marked pieces with aftermarket value. Gold Guys' bullion sister site (goldguysbullion.com) gives a round-trip advantage for sellers redeploying proceeds into bullion. Sellers whose box differs from the median should expect their own test to differ.
The standard caveat applies: a five-operator test panel has a small-sample error band, and a single chain in a single 30-day window is not a substitute for a longitudinal study. The Q3 2026 quarterly will republish the payout table after a wider audit cycle with multiple item profiles. The methodology is published; the test is reproducible.
Trust Signals — Who Earned Them
Trust Signals is where the cash-for-gold category looks its best. The category median is 9/10 — the highest across all eight dimensions. Three operators earned 9 or 10. Buying gold from strangers requires demonstrable third-party validation, and most of the panel has invested in the work to earn it.
The verifiable signals our rubric awards points for are externally checkable: BBB rating accredited 5+ years, Trustpilot 4.0+ with 100+ verified reviews, state licensing where required, LinkedIn-verifiable ownership, published insurance amount, and independent press in the last 24 months. Self-published "5 stars on our own site" does not count.
Express Gold Cash leads with a perfect 10/10. The verified numbers: BBB A+ accredited with zero complaints; 11,186 positive Trustpilot reviews (an order of magnitude the largest verified count in our panel); 25+ years in business; $100M+ transacted; FedEx insurance up to $100,000 per shipment, published. Press in the last 24 months includes PRNewswire releases, Boston Herald, Fashionista, and syndicated regional press per Semrush. TopConsumerReviews.com ranks the company #1. The trust stack is the deepest we have audited in this category, and it is the reason Express Gold Cash earned 62 overall despite scoring 5/15 on Pricing Transparency.
The Alloy Market and Gold Guys both scored 9/10. The Alloy Market carries BBB A+, an embedded Trustpilot widget with 4.5+ stars across 100+ verified reviews, a bylined editorial team (Aversano, Wu, Hernandez, Bryant) with LinkedIn-verifiable profiles, 30 Forbes backlinks per Semrush, and press in CBS, USA Today, MSN, Yahoo. Gold Guys carries BBB A+, named long-form testimonials that reference staff by first name, 15+ years of history, a 650,000-customer claim, Minnesota's Best Bronze Winner recognition, and CBS News, Bringmethenews, and Postbulletin coverage. Both built the standard recipe and earned the rubric's full credit.
The two operators where trust signals thin out are SellYourGold.com (7/10) and Liry's (6/10). SellYourGold.com has 20+ years of operating history confirmed by WHOIS and backlink graph, and press from NYT, Forbes, HuffPost, The Penny Hoarder, Jewelers Mutual. The deductions are specific: the BBB grade was not extractable in our crawl due to the TLS certificate verification failure at the root domain, no Trustpilot widget is embedded, and the TLS posture itself is a 2026-grade trust signal that has gone wrong. Liry's has 37 years of family-owned history (since 1989), a Latino-cultural niche it speaks to authentically, and a Shopify retail catalog. What is not surfaced: a BBB rating, an embedded Trustpilot widget, a published insurance amount, or state licensing enumeration. The "Happy Customers" wall at /pages/happy-customers is self-aggregated, and self-aggregated does not earn rubric credit.
The pattern: trust signals are what this industry has invested in, because trust signals are how a stranger online convinces another stranger online to mail valuable items. The next layer the methodology rewards — and the layer the panel has not yet invested in — is pricing transparency. The two should travel together. They currently do not.
Three Operators to Avoid (And Why)
The methodology does not produce "operators to avoid" lists as a special editorial product; it produces scores. The three lowest-scoring operators in the Q2 2026 panel are Express Gold Cash (62), Liry's Jewelry (58), and SellYourGold.com (54). We name them here, against the rubric, with what triggered each score. None of these constitutes an accusation of bad faith — they are methodology-traceable outcomes, and any reader who disagrees with our weights can recompute.
Express Gold Cash (62/100). Including Express Gold Cash on this list requires immediate context. The company earned a perfect 10/10 on Trust Signals — the only operator in the panel to do so — and the fastest end-to-end timeline in our test (3 business days from kit receipt to payment). The score is depressed by Pricing Transparency at 5/15: no public calculator, no payout-vs-melt percentage, a posture that is "ship first, trust our 25 years, we will quote fair." Pricing Transparency and Trust Signals carry the same 15% weight. By the rubric, a company that has earned the deepest trust stack in the category has also earned the obligation to publish the spread that trust stack was built on. Express Gold Cash has chosen not to. Subject to the next quarterly review, this is the single change that would move the company materially up the leaderboard.
Liry's Jewelry (58/100). Liry's has built a meaningfully more transparent pre-shipment quote flow than competitors twice its size — a working calculator with weight and purity inputs and an explicit "the amount we quote is the amount we pay" commitment — and was punished not for opacity but for an under-developed Trust Signals layer (6/10). What the score flags: no surfaced BBB rating, no embedded Trustpilot widget, self-aggregated rather than third-party-verified testimonials, no published insurance amount, and limited U.S. press in the last 24 months. The 37-year operating history is real and unusual; the rubric does not award full Trust Signals credit for tenure alone when the verifiable third-party signals tenure usually produces are missing. By the rubric, Liry's has done the harder work — pre-shipment pricing transparency — already. The remaining work is the recipe.
SellYourGold.com (54/100). SellYourGold.com owns the category-defining brand keyword (#1 for "cash for gold" at 14,800 monthly U.S. searches per Semrush) and a 20+ year history WHOIS and backlinks confirm. The methodology scored the company at 54 for specific reasons: Pricing Transparency at 4/15 (no calculator, no published spread, no payout examples), Support Quality at 5/10 (responses from a generic mailbox; one test inquiry went unanswered for the full 30-day window), and a TLS certificate verification failure at the root domain on the date of our crawl, treated as a partial deduction on Security and a soft negative trust signal in 2026. The brand authority is real; site-level execution has not kept pace. By the rubric, the company is one architecture rebuild away from materially recovering its score, and the brand authority means the rebuild would yield outsized leaderboard movement. We will retest at the August 25, 2026 quarterly review.
What's Changing in the Industry
Four shifts are visible in our Q2 2026 baseline that we believe will reshape the category over the next 18 months.
Pricing transparency is the next competitive frontier. The category treats opacity as an operational necessity (defensible for the post-shipment firm quote) and as a marketing posture (indefensible for the percentage-of-melt range). The marketing posture will not survive the next two quarterly cycles. Adjacent-category operators — Mene's published buyback at 90% of spot less 10%, Unvault's 15–20% platform fee range, Heirfolio's broken-out spread plus storage plus delivery on every Labs order — are demonstrating that customers accept a range with the inspection caveat. The cash-for-gold operator that publishes a range first will earn category-leading Pricing Transparency credit at the next quarterly review.
Mail-in-only positioning is losing share to digital-platform operators. Express Gold Cash, with the deepest trust stack in the category, also carries the slowest-growing organic-keyword footprint per Semrush (6,685 vs. The Alloy Market's 26,737 and Mene's 15,469). The Alloy Market — newer, calculator-led, multi-author — is out-publishing every operator in the panel on informational queries and has built a content engine mail-in-only competitors cannot replicate without a fundamental product change. The mail-in flow itself is not endangered; the mail-in-only positioning is. Operators that pair the mail-in flow with a tool surface (calculator, valuation, photo upload) will compound; operators that do not, will not.
Bitcoin settlement is entering the market. The intersection of "I have gold to sell" and "I want to buy Bitcoin" was an entirely DIY workflow as recently as 2024. By Q2 2026 there is a published operator (Heirfolio, in estate-planning at 89/100, where The Touchstone Report has an affiliate relationship disclosed in full below and at /about/affiliates) offering cross-currency settlement at the point of sale: USD, gold, or BTC, with spread, storage, and partner-custody fee broken out per order. None of the five operators in our cash-for-gold panel currently offers BTC settlement. The Semrush keyword "sell gold for bitcoin" returned only 20 monthly U.S. searches at our scoring date — but the underlying intent is structural, not seasonal. Operators that ignore this in the next 12 months will cede a small but valuable customer segment to the platform layer.
Calculator-as-content is now a competitive moat. The Alloy Market's scrap calculator ranks #2 for "scrap gold calculator" (22,200 monthly U.S. searches) and #3 for "gold calculator" (40,500). On competitive PPC rates, those two queries together would cost five figures per month to acquire through paid search. The Alloy Market acquires them organically because the calculator itself is the SEO asset. Liry's has a smaller version of this advantage. The three operators in our panel without a calculator (Gold Guys with spot-only, Express Gold Cash, SellYourGold.com) are paying the opportunity cost in foregone informational traffic, and the gap will widen as leading calculators accrue more backlinks and E-E-A-T credibility. This is no longer optional infrastructure.
What We're Watching Next Quarter
The Q3 2026 quarterly publishes August 25, 2026. Between now and then, three questions will determine where the leaderboard moves.
Will any operator publish a payout-vs-melt percentage range? This is the single methodology-traceable change that would move an operator materially up the leaderboard. We will retest every operator's pricing page. If any operator publishes a range — even with the standard inspection caveat — they will receive immediate Pricing Transparency credit, scored outside the quarterly cycle per our material-events policy.
Will Express Gold Cash and Gold Guys ship a calculator? The two operators with the deepest trust stacks are the two where the absence of a calculator is the most visible opportunity cost. Either could close the gap to The Alloy Market on Pricing Transparency in a single sprint.
Will the panel expand? We are scoping additions for Q3 — Cash for Gold USA, Worthy.com's jewelry buyback, a top-five regional operator outside Minnesota, and at least one in-person pawnshop chain with a credible mail-in arm. The Q3 panel will be at least seven operators and may be ten. A larger panel will move the medians and may produce the first "strong" band score (75+) in this category — or confirm the baseline finding that cash-for-gold operators currently cap at the top of the "fair" band by category convention.
Methodology Notes
This report scores the Cash-for-Gold category against The Touchstone Report v1.0 scoring methodology, with the following dimension weights:
| Dimension | Weight | Max Points |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing Transparency | 15% | 15 |
| Payout / Cost | 25% | 15 |
| Trust Signals | 15% | 10 |
| Process Speed | 10% | 10 |
| Customer Support Quality | 10% | 10 |
| Asset / Data Security | 10% | 10 |
| Reversibility & Flexibility | 10% | 10 |
| Disposal Documentation | 5% | 10 |
| Total | 100% | — |
For Cash-for-Gold (category A), the Inheritance Fit dimension is replaced by Disposal Documentation — a 10-point sub-dimension measuring whether the operator provides the records the customer needs for tax basis, estate accounting, and melt-receipt verification. Final score: Σ (raw_dimension_score / max_dimension_points × category_weight × 100), rounded to nearest integer, 0–100 scale. The math is visible on every entity profile. The full methodology is published at /methodology.
About The Touchstone Report
The Touchstone Report is an independent industry index for the gold, jewelry, and inheritance industries. Every entity we score is scored against a methodology we published openly before the scores existed. Every dimension's raw score is visible on the entity profile so any reader can recompute the total. Entities receive a draft scorecard 30 days before publication for fact-check; they cannot veto publication, and their unedited response is published on the entity profile. We do not accept payment from rated entities. We do earn referral fees from some entities we cover, including Heirfolio in the estate-planning category. Affiliate relationships are disclosed in plain text on every entity profile that contains them and at /about/affiliates, and have zero influence on the score per the published editorial policy. The Touchstone Report is funded primarily by Heirfolio; editorial independence is enforced by the published policy and audited on every report.
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