Greedy Goblin

Monday, April 20, 2015

Business post: Selling for non-traders

So, you aren't particularly interested in trading and don't want to spend too much time in the market, because you are missing ratting ticks or mining cycles or whatever, so you just sell to buy orders. Congratulation, you are a moron who makes traders have 20x higher ISK/hour than you.

Of course some 0.01M meta drop or leftover fitting from your old ship can be dumped to buy orders. It is also true that spending an hour babysitting 1B worth of orders to sell 2% higher doesn't worth it. So below I show how can you sell your wares high with little effort. Of course there is always a catch: you won't sell fast, it can take a few days while you finally sell.

At first, you need a trading alt in the hub you are selling in. Training accounting, broker relations and retail to 4 takes a few days. Getting 3-4 standings with the faction and the corporation holding the station are trivial tasks. Your market alt can later find you prices and buy fittings and ships too.

Once a day log to this alt. Accept the contracts from your main that contain new wares, and start with the old orders. Just open wallet/orders, right-click every order, select modify:
Decrease their value by 1%, rounded to 3 non-zero digits. So from 139M in the picture make 137M. From 210M make 207M, from 308M make 304 and from a 910M order make 900M. No, you don't have to check the actual price, you did that when you created the order. Just blindly decrease it by about 1%. Ignore the 0.01-ers, sooner or later they either stop following you or simply get bought out with your order.

Finally create the new orders, after you dumped the low worth and odd items. Select every item one by one, select sell, click on the icon on the right side that brings up the detailed market window. Set the order below the lowest sell order, rounded to 3 digits (so if the lowest sell is 142999999.99 then set it to 142M).

You're done, see your alt tomorrow, bye!


PS: Out of Sight and Mordus Angels once again massacred the minions of Evil.
SMA remains SMA.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

When you factor in small volumes, the hassle and risk of jumping product out of null, it starts to make business sense to relinquish 5-10% of the proceeds and use a reliable fence.

If updating dozens or hundreds of market orders feels like a chore, let someone else do it.

Ultimately, when your allies profit, you profit.

Anonymous said...

your item = (buy order + sell order )/2
and never touch until sold

Gevlon said...

No, because the market price can change. If it goes down, you'll never ever sell.

Zaxin said...

Leaving items for 3 months at Average (buy+sell)/2, or some at current, others at 10% above, and others at 30% above is fairly common.

"if it goes down you will never ever sell"....only if the price is artificially inflated when you list, or if there are upcoming changes which will impact it.

In which case, the vendor should probably keep more up to date on changes.