Methodology · BallIndex

We rank by landed cost, not sticker price

A €40 dozen from Britain can cost more than a €50 dozen from Ireland once shipping, customs duty, VAT and the An Post handling fee are added. Ranking by listed price would mislead Irish buyers, so every default ranking on this site is sorted by estimated landed €/ball, and every deal carries a confidence label.

The landed-cost formula

landed_total = item_price + shipping + customs_duty + VAT + handling_fee

IE / EU stock: customs = 0, VAT = 0 (already in the retail price), handling = 0
GB / US / non-EU (charges due on delivery):
  customs_duty = €3 × distinct product types (a single-model dozen = 1)
  VAT = 23% × (item + shipping + customs_duty)
  handling_fee = €6.95 (An Post, only if not pre-paid at checkout)
Non-EU, import fees collected at checkout (DDP): listed total is final — nothing re-added

Worked example — Titleist Pro V1 (4A / Near Mint), Great Britain → Ireland

A 12-ball listing at €47.00 + €9.50 shipping looks like €4.71/ball. Landed, it is €6.68/ball:

Item price	€47.00
Shipping to Ireland	€9.50
Customs duty (€3 per product type)	€3.00
VAT (23%)	€13.69
An Post handling	€6.95
Landed total	€80.14
Landed €/ball	€6.68

Confidence labels

Final price Final price — the total you pay is known: IE/EU stock, or all import charges collected at checkout. Eligible for ranking.

Estimated Estimated — non-EU with enough information to estimate goods, shipping, duty, VAT and likely handling. Eligible for ranking, shown as an estimate.

Not final Not final — shipping or import treatment is unclear. Shown for transparency but never ranked.

Can't rank Can’t rank — too incomplete, unstable or risky to rank.

Customs, VAT & the An Post fee — the caveats

From 1 July 2026, Revenue applies a €3 customs duty per distinct product type on non-EU eCommerce parcels valued at €150 or less (Great Britain counts as non-EU). A dozen identical golf balls is treated as one product type; a mixed bundle of different models may be more.
Golf balls are not named explicitly by Revenue, so the single-product-type assumption is ours, applied conservatively.
Irish VAT (23%) applies to goods + shipping + the €3 duty for non-EU imports. For IE/EU stock VAT is already in the retail price and is never added again.
The An Post handling fee (from €6.95, effective 3 Feb 2026) is only added when import charges are not pre-paid and delivery is by post — it is skipped for DDP listings and may differ for courier deliveries.
The €3 customs duty is generally non-refundable on returns, so imported bargains carry a hidden risk we flag on the deal.

Refurbished & affiliate policy

Refurbished, refinished, lake and range balls are excluded from default rankings and clearly separated, because they are materially different products (see the grade guide).

Affiliate disclosure. Some outbound links are affiliate links (eBay Partner Network, Amazon Associates and others) and we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Affiliate status never affects a deal’s landed-cost ranking — ranking is computed purely from the numbers above. Affiliate links are tagged on each deal.

Data status & how ingestion works. Right now this site shows 0 demo, 3 verified and 48 live deals. Each deal is tagged with its provenance:

Demo (fixture / curated_demo) — illustrative seed data; the “deal” link points to this page, with the example URL kept in the tooltip for shape.
Verified (curated_verified) — a manually checked real deal with a real URL, price and observed date; the link goes to the real listing.
Live API (live_api) — fetched from a source’s live API; links to the real listing.

The data is produced by a real ingestion pipeline, not hand-edited: node ingest/run.mjs --source <id> runs the source’s adapter → normalizes the raw listing (seller term → canonical grade, title → ball model, currency → EUR) → validates it against the listing schema → writes data/deal-listings.json. Adapters only ever emit raw inputs — the landed total and confidence label are always derived afterwards by the calculator above, and every run also appends an immutable price observation (data/price-observations.json) so real history accrues over time.

Price history: 0 use seeded illustrative history (a sparkline switches to real observed history once a deal has two or more real observations). Currency conversions (GBP→EUR ≈ 1.175, USD→EUR ≈ 0.92) are illustrative. At launch the eBay Browse adapter switches from its committed fixture to the live API (credential-gated); the Amazon PA and curated paths move from reviewed import to live as access allows. All figures remain estimates — confirm the final price with the seller before buying.

Primary sources

Revenue.ie — new customs rules from 1 July 2026 & low-value consignment relief (€3 per product type; €3 included in the VAT base).
An Post — customs handling fee from €6.95, effective 3 February 2026.
European Commission — removal of the €150 customs-duty exemption threshold (2026).
Snapshot of deals: 30 May 2026.

Methodology and disclosure: how landed cost is calculated