September in review, and a correction to how we count revenue
September closed at $3.4M on 157 orders*, up 24% on August’s revenue and 35% on order count. The website did most of the lifting: 138 website orders against 97 in August. Silver sat at about $64 across both months, so the improvement did not come from a price move.
This brief also carries a correction. Reconciling every order record for the year, we found that client sell orders, money CoinGuide paid out to buy metal back, are stored as completed orders and were counted as revenue in our earlier briefs. Only the few marked with the Buyback status were being taken out. From January to September that is $14.5M of buybacks, including a single $4.3M client liquidation in February.
Every revenue figure below has been restated without them. The shape of the year does not change, but the levels do: the restated year so far is $51.8M, and August was $2.8M rather than the $3.6M we reported. We would rather correct this now than carry it forward.
Our work: September delivered, October planned
Delivered in September
- Goldback products added. New Goldback product category and listings built out on the site.
- Data review. Reconciled the year’s order records, including separating client sell orders from sales.
- Homepage carousel slide. New Buyback / We Buy slide on the homepage.
- Checkout review. Investigated a customer checkout error and the “Error processing your request” message at checkout.
- Monthly account maintenance.
- Plugin updates. Mid-month and end-of-month update rounds.
Planned for October
- Plan for Merchant Center’s new image minimum. Google Merchant Center’s minimum product image size rises to 500 × 500 pixels on January 31, 2027. Products with smaller images will no longer be approved or shown on Google, We will put together a plan for bringing the catalog up to size and work through it over the coming months, well ahead of the deadline.
- Maintenance, plugin updates and support as needed.
The month at a glance
Revenue and orders by month
Data table
| Month | Sales | Orders | Avg order | Buybacks | As previously counted | Silver /oz | Gold /oz |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 2026 | $16,592,849 | 580 | $28,608 | $2,467,967 | $19,060,816 | $90.39 | $4,729 |
| Feb 2026 | $6,407,217 | 275 | $23,299 | $5,733,300 | $12,140,516 | $79.54 | $4,932 |
| Mar 2026 | $6,934,848 | 254 | $27,303 | $274,521 | $7,209,369 | $75.89 | $4,835 |
| Apr 2026 | $2,198,395 | 122 | $18,020 | $854,486 | $3,052,881 | $75.52 | $4,699 |
| May 2026 | $5,197,537 | 165 | $31,500 | $2,097,271 | $7,294,808 | $76.04 | $4,550 |
| Jun 2026 | $4,837,417 | 300 | $16,125 | $969,716 | $5,807,133 | $64.91 | $4,155 |
| Jul 2026 | $3,420,639 | 161 | $21,246 | $110,295 | $3,530,934 | $58.41 | $4,062 |
| Aug 2026 | $2,761,647 | 116 | $23,807 | $1,680,681 | $4,442,328 | $65.54 | $4,404 |
| Sep 2026 | $3,411,548 | 157 | $21,730 | $278,311 | $3,671,721 | $64.33 | $4,323 |
Data table
| Month | Online transactions |
|---|---|
| Nov 2024 | 115 |
| Dec 2024 | 95 |
| Jan 2025 | 77 |
| Feb 2025 | 113 |
| Mar 2025 | 99 |
| Apr 2025 | 122 |
| May 2025 | 81 |
| Jun 2025 | 94 |
| Jul 2025 | 88 |
| Aug 2025 | 80 |
| Sep 2025 | 129 |
| Oct 2025 | 233 |
| Nov 2025 | 123 |
| Dec 2025 | 287 |
| Jan 2026 | 524 |
| Feb 2026 | 269 |
| Mar 2026 | 312 |
| Apr 2026 | 156 |
| May 2026 | 226 |
| Jun 2026 | 360 |
| Jul 2026 | 168 |
| Aug 2026 | 127 |
| Sep 2026 | 176 |
What September tells us
September highlights
September beat August on every order measure. On the restated basis, sales rose from $2.8M to $3.4M, orders from 116 to 157, and website orders from 97 to 138, up 42%. These come from order records, not tracking.
It was not a price move. The median silver price at the moment of each sale was $64.33 in September against $65.54 in August, and gold was slightly lower too. More people bought at the same prices.
The growth came from ordinary-sized orders. Orders between $1,000 and $5,000 went from 32 to 50, and between $5,000 and $25,000 from 44 to 66. There were also six orders above $100,000 against four in August, so this is not a small number of large buyers carrying the month.
Phone and wire sales held steady. Orders your team entered directly, excluding buybacks, were 19 in both months, at $834K and $903K.
Buyback volume dropped back. $278,311 across 8 orders in September, against $1.7M across 17 in August.
Organic search is almost entirely brand. Of the Search Console clicks where Google reports the query, 81% are people searching for Guidance Corporation or CoinGuide by name. “Monster box” searches showed CoinGuide 3,946 times at an average position of 7.3 and earned 41 clicks. One small opportunity: “guidance corporation coupon code” appeared 625 times and earned no clicks.
* How revenue is defined in this brief. Paid and pending orders, net of cancellations, failures and reset records, with client sell orders removed. Sell orders are identified by the Buyback status or by order notes describing a client sell order, buyback or liquidation. On the previous definition September would read $3.7M on 163 orders.
† Online transactions are GA4 purchase events. GA4 currently records more of these than the site takes orders, so the year-on-year change is directional. Figures for earlier months have also shifted slightly since last month’s pull; August now reads 127 rather than 123.
Attribution lags. Google Ads keeps assigning conversions to past clicks for several weeks, so September’s ad results will improve in hindsight.
Search Console figures cover September 1 to 28, the latest available when the data was pulled.