Greedy Goblin

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Business Thursday: no competition!

The dream of every trader is having no competition. Surprisingly it's not a rare thing (unless you are trading veldspar in Jita). If you work in nullsec, it's rather the norm than an exception. But even in highsec hubs you can check the market and find it empty:
And at this point most traders do a serious mistake, letting this opportunity pass by: they price their wares too high thinking that buyers will have no choice but to buy it. It is wrong for two reasons: at first no one has to buy anything ever. They could live without it till now, they can keep living without it. They can also take some jumps and get it. Secondly your monopoly will end sooner or later. If you don't sell by then, your window closes.

So how to price an item in such cases? At first check the history:
This case the sales happened in the 130-140 range. You shouldn't go too far from it.

Secondly, just type in your first guess into the sell price field and watch the % next to it:
145M is almost 10% over the regional average. The buyer will see the same number, except in ugly red. He is informed that this is expensive, he could be getting the same item cheaper by waiting or going another region. I'd strongly suggest not to try selling over +20% and preferably over 10%. Of course if the number is 1212156%, you can ignore it.

That's it. Don't get too greedy and don't for a second think that you control the market or anything. You are just a seller trying to get some profit. Be humble with your demands and you'll sell well.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Grr. I wonder if you are the guy who dropped the profit of gistum c-type adaptive invulnerability fields to nearly nil from Hek to other trade hubs...

Unknown said...

If you have an estimate of 'travel cost', then you can price your goods based on the distance from the hub.

E.g. if you think that the travel cost is 10m / jump, and you are 10 jumps away from the hub, then you can add 100m to the hub price to get a 'competitive with hub' price. You want the prospective buyer to be approximately indifferent between two options - travel to hub and buy at hub prices, and buy here.

I think travel cost function is probably affine - that is, there's an initial cost for traveling at ALL, and then there's an incremental cost per jump.