Are The Amazon Golf Balls Any Good?

Testing the Amazon Basics Golf Balls – are they actually any good, or just cheap? 🧐

In this video, Ryan puts the new Amazon golf balls up against the TaylorMade TP5x at an average swing speed, testing shots with a Wedge, 7 Iron and Driver. Find out how do these direct-to-consumer, lower price point balls stack up on distance, spin, and control and are they worth putting in your golf bag?

02:50 – Indoor testing
08:15 – Trackman data & numbers

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Happy golfing! ⛳️

Hello there. Welcome back to the Performance Center here at Howley Hall Golf Club in Leeds where I’ve got two different golf balls to test today. As you can see by the logo on that one, this is an Amazon basics golf ball. Now, these have just come to the market. You can buy them on Amazon right now and they’re generally under 20 for a dozen. So, about 1718 is what I’ve seen with maybe delivery charge depending on your prime. Obviously got Black Friday coming up as well. So, you never know. There might be some deals on them for that, too. But I’m going to hit them in here, test them with a wedge 7 iron, and a driver, and I’m going to put them up against the ball that I use, which is a Tailor-ade TP5X. See exactly how they perform. But I’m not going to do it at my normal swing speed. I’m going to test them at the average swing speed for a club golfer with all three of these clubs. So, I’m just going to hit a 60 yard pitch shot, see how they perform. I’m gonna hit a seven iron at around 75 miles an hour and I’m going to hit a driver at around 85 miles an hour. So, we will see exactly if there’s any difference between the really cheap and really good value Amazon ball and one of the industry leaders in TP5X. So, these are obviously a very different golf ball and it’s like comparing apples with oranges. It’s very, very different, but we should see some differences in how they perform. Now, that obviously has to be that reason why you would pay the extra, let’s face it, what is nearly £30 for a dozen TP5 or TP5X or Prov1 or whatever premium ball you use versus the under20 a dozen for an Amazon golf ball. Now, there has to be a reason why you would spend that extra money. And some of it is marketing, some of it is the fact that the best players in the world use it, but there is also a technological advantage as well. We can see both balls. I’ve cut this Amazon one in half and I’ve also got a TP5X chopped in half here as well. So you can see obviously the the TP5 is a five layer golf ball. So a smaller core than what we see in the Amazon golf ball here. And I’ve got something that’s a you know a direct kind of competitor for this in this is a Wilson Duo soft golf ball. So again two-piece. So we’ve got a a cover and a core in there as well. So quite similar in its construction. I can see the the cover is actually thinner on the Amazon ball versus the Wilson one. And obviously in the tailor made we have different mantles, a core. Um obviously the cover in there as well which is made of different materials. So we would expect different layers to do different jobs. So some may be better with the driver, some may be better with irons, pitching, chipping, putting. So there’s something in there for every single facet of your game. Now many of us aren’t good enough to notice the difference between those. And I would suggest many average golfers and higher handicapped golfers would not know the difference between one of these and one of these. So why would you buy these? Well, let’s have a look and see if there is a real difference. Why? In terms of its look and in terms of the feel in the hands, cuz that’s something that you can generally tell the difference when you are when you’ve got a premium ball to a more disty one if you like. The cover does feel firmer. It’s a bit shinier. The TP51 does feel that bit softer. you can dig your thumbnail into it a little bit more. So, there is definitely that kind of what’s perceived as premium feel about the TP5X, whereas you don’t really get that with the Amazon golf ball. But that’s the same of every ball in this kind of category, whether it be your Tailor Made distance, whether it be a Stricks and Soft feel, whether it be, you know, in Tailorade, they do a distance ball, um, Duo Soft in in Wilson, which we’ve done a lot of work with as well. So, all these balls do feel fairly similar. um when we’re talking about this kind of price point. So, it’s nothing new really. But what do they feel like when we hit a seven iron with them? Like I say, I’m going to try and swing this at 75 mph and get a good gauge. It feels quite soft compression. So, like like those golf balls I’ve just mentioned in that kind of 20 to 22 kind of category, um it feels very similar to many of them. that kind of two-piece construction with the larger core and the um you know a much thinner cover on there. They all feel quite similar. They’re easy to compress. And the reason they’re like that is because lower club head speeds need that golf ball to be able to be easy to compress so that it comes off and actually works for you. Now those sort of tall level balls are much firmer. So you need to hit them harder to get them to do their job. I say it does it feels nice. It feels good off the face. It doesn’t feel clicky and hard and horrible like many of you are probably expecting it to. It’s just whether you can get over the fact that it’s got the Amazon logo on the front of it, I really don’t know. Um, but for many of you out there, you’re really not going to care. Right, let’s hit some with the TP5X. Straight away feels much firmer. Probably sounds it as I don’t know if you picked that up on the video, but the actual feel of hitting this golf ball is a much firmer kind of contact and certainly something that gives you a bit more feedback as a player as to one how you struck it and two kind of you feel where the shot’s going to come out and where it’s going to go. Whereas with the kind of lower compression, you can get the odd one that just goes like a bullet and the odd one that comes off a little bit soft and they’re kind of a bit inconsistent. Whereas you get that consistency with the tall level premium golf ball and you get that kind of feel that you associate with one as well. Again, it feels really good. It’s it as you would expect. It’s exactly what I expect to feel when I hit a golf ball because it’s the golf ball that I use in play. You know, I know it’s very good. It performs fantastically well for me and certainly better than many of the other premium golf balls on the market do. The reason I choose TP5 and use it myself is that I find it’s better within a hundred yards of the green. I love how it feels when you pitch with it and I feel like the spin is under control. I don’t get flyers and things like that. I love chipping with it. Bunker shot spin more with it and putting feels great with it as well. And that’s something that we haven’t spoken about here, but that will be the biggest difference between these two balls in in the feel is that the Amazon basics ball with it being that lower compression and two-piece construction is going to feel like it almost melts onto the face of the putter when you hit it, whereas you get that bit better feedback with the tall level ball. Right, let’s move up to driver. So, we’re going to repeat this with the driver, try and swing it around 85 miles an hour and see how it performs. We’re going to start obviously with the Amazon golf ball. Again, nice and soft one. 88 miles an hour. That pretty good. 225 total. Little fade. Felt good. Felt solid off the face if I’m being picky. It probably feels a bit firmer now hit driver than what I’d expect the TP5X to feel. But we’ll we’ll hit that again in a second. But not not dissatisfied. I think it felt okay. Yeah, really really good. And certainly, you know, that’s always the thing when you get a cheaper golf ball like this, you just think it’s going to be dreadful and you think it’s going to sound awful and not really perform well. I think when we get to look at the results a little bit later on, some of them will be closer than you think. And that’s certainly what we found when we’ve done ball testing before, the biggest difference tends to be with those partial shots and pitching. That’ll do. Right. TP5X. Then there’s a definite difference in feel. Still both feel good. None of them feel bad. They just feel different. Um I can feel the TP5X. I don’t know. It just seems to kind of spring off a bit better. I don’t know whether we’ll see that in the results. I have no idea, but it just feels nicer off the club face. Um, it’s I think it comes down more than anything to the fact that I’m just used to what it feels like and I know kind of how it feels when I hit a driver with it. I mean, albeit I don’t normally hit it at this speed with a driver, but the feel of the strike is still very similar. Right, let’s hit a couple more and we’ll have a look at those results. Now that we’ve managed to hit shots with our wedge, with our seven iron, and our driver, let’s see exactly what’s going on here. So, if we look at the wedges, okay, we can see with the Amazon ball, um the thing that jumps out me straight away is the spin, right? Just over 5,000 RPM in terms of height, they’re pretty similar in terms of carry distance, in terms of everything else. Not really much of a difference, but the spin is huge. Right? When we go to TP5X, we can see it’s 2 12,000 RPM difference on just a 60 yard pitch shot here or 50 yard pitch shot, 55 yard, which is massive in terms of actually stopping it on a green. Um, you know, if you want your pitch shots to run further, then great, the Amazon ball’s better, but if you want them to actually stop, the TP5X is obviously a much better alternative. When we look at 7 iron, uh, we can still see a bit of a difference in spin with the TP5X spinning more than the Amazon golf ball, but that may be good for some of you when we’re talking about 7 iron. Some of you may spin spin the ball ridiculously and want to try and bring that down. Now, we can see in terms of the carry and total carries are basically the same, but the TP5X stops faster at 145. So, it’s about 56 yards quicker at stopping because of that spin. and it does go a little higher in the air as well. So that’s something to bear in mind. Then when it comes to driver, they’re pretty much the same. The the performance is very very similar. In fact, we can see the spin is, you know, within 100 uh 150. Anyway, in terms of the ball speed, it’s the same. In terms of the carry, the TP5X just edges it, but I think it’s negligible. You wouldn’t really notice that on the golf course. And the height, similar as well. Yeah. So when we’re seeing this at your average golfer club head speed, we’re not seeing that much difference with a driver. We are seeing a bit more spin with the seven iron to get you to actually hold the green better. And we are seeing a ridiculously massive difference in the spin when we are hitting partial shots with wedges. So, what I’m saying is if you are a player who will not notice these differences, if you are of a level where you just want something round and white to hit, then the Amazon Basics golf ball could be absolutely fine because we’re not seeing any real distance disadvantage. What we are seeing is when you get a slightly better player and you want this ball to stop and you want that kind of um I suppose that kind of improvement in your um equipment to be able to make you a better golfer, make you score better. we can see that TP5X ball is really doing that job. So there are markets for both and this is why there are different price points of golf ball. Obviously we’ve we’ve highlighted the difference in the construction as well of these. But the construction of this Amazon ball is very similar to what we see in the likes of a Wilson Duosoft like I’ve got here and it’s kind of what I would expect to see of that as well. So it’s a similar price to a Wilson golf ball in that Duo soft. Obviously, we haven’t tested that, but there’s some other videos that I have done very recently on golf ball testing and it was the Tailor Made distance ball actually that we looked at, which is very similar to the Amazon Basics and also the Duosoft in that it’s that lower compression and we saw a huge drop off in the pitching spin when we were testing that as well. So, whilst these balls perform really nicely in the other areas, there is a huge drop off in those scoring shots around the greens. But like I say, the price does make them fairly attractive. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed that video. It’s been great to test. It’s the first time I’ve hit any of these Amazon golf balls. And to be honest, there is definitely a golfer out there that they will suit. But if you prioritize that bit more performance, then spending a little bit more on your golf balls is probably worth