Basic merchanting guide

keihan007#7641

Hey, I made this thread basically because certain merchants on my server do things which annoy me to no end. Lets start with an example.

Merchant X bought gold for roughly 3,6m if I am not mistaken, I am assuming clean 3,6m for purposes of this example. Gold is now 3,75m. They are selling packs for 930k, which cost him 25 gold for 100. His costs are 91,8m and his earnings will be 90m. His profit is thus 1,2m, which is roughly 1,3%. We return to this example at end of this post.

There are many ways of merchanting, the more common ones are on certain markets like FSP coin/C pack, mirages, tokens and so on. These are generally pretty competive but starter friendly as starting capital doesnt need to be overly large and you can compensate the lack of it with activity. What I mean by this is each C pack is roughly 140k currently on Etherblade, buying less, selling more. The point is, you can buy decent amount of them for pretty cheap, increase price a bit and sell them, thus making a profit. Things like packs take more capital as you need least the 91,8m from earlier example to even get the 100 packs for 25 gold. Essentially you need less coins for these kinds of markets, which makes them starter friendly as biggest difficulty in merchanting is gathering base capital.

Another market is boutique items, which is generally coupled with big ticket items like shards and other pack stuff. This requires bit more of future planning than first type of merchanting does but its still really only bout investing for profit. These items are also more expensive, which means larger capital to start with but if done right this type of merchanting is basically guaranteed money. You need to keep eye on gold prices, sales, promos and sale "cycles" though as of late we dont really seem to have sale cycles but PWE throwing just packs after packs on sale, which is taking its toll on market. The reason why both the price you buy gold and the current price of gold are important is because what are investing in? Gold, selling items for less than it costs for you to restock is hurting you, even if you make profit out of it. Promos are important as while their impact on gold is unique each promo, they still impact gold prices more or less.

The cheaper items you are selling, the more quantity you need to make strong profits. Depending on market and how much competition there is, you shouldnt expect more than 5-10% profits per item. Sure, there are situations where stars align just right and you can make ridiculous profit margins but those are more luck than planning based situations. I would also try to avoid extremely low profit margins because even small shifts on market might **** such merchant. Its impossible to give exact numbers on what you should aim for profit margin as each market is different.


I personally merchant boutique items and whatever I find from other shops for too cheap, though lately I havent put in the effort to do more than just merchant boutique items now that I got rid of all the **** I opened during some pack sale few months ago, Either way, my latest successful merchanting move was to spend 500 gold on ocean orbs, which I sold for 105m and increased price to 115m later on. My buying price was roughly 95m so I was making up to 20% profit on my last orbs as there was lack of competition. Most boutique item merchants fail to sell their items cheap enough that you can re-invest your coin back into gold for next decent sale. Sure, they will make absolutely ridiculous profit margins but at the cost of time. I will have invested and re-invested my earnings into several items by the time those guys sell their items month or two later.

There are some merchants who will undercut my 5-10% profit margins but those generally have way too little items to really factor into what I do. They sell their items in day or two, making me the cheapest shop till I run out. I consider myself medium sized merchant - I have roughly 2k gold worth of wealth, which would allow me to participate on most decent sales if I werent aiming for NP set. Because of this, I have to hold 1,2k gold at all times if possible as ultimate spend rewards is one of the promos which truly affects gold prices and I admit, its gonna hurt my merchanting a lot.

I promised to return to the example from start. The 2 problems, which I hopefully covered in this post were:

1. !.3% profit margin is way too low, small shifts on market are going to quickly turn you from making profit into making a loss.

2. They did not pay attention to gold prices. The reason they got cheap gold for those packs was because of double charge rewards and restocking at 3,75m is going to cost them 95,625m. So if they are restocking, they are essentially making 2,8% loss on items they are selling.

Lastly, if you for reason or another ever find yourseöf in a situation where you buy something and prices start to plummet, be willing to dump the items quickly at a small loss. I had opened a lot of packs late spring and I didnt dump the items "cheap" when they started to plummet, I must of lost 300-500m on it.

Ps. Hopefully this will be helpful for those who care to read it - I suspect I need to rewrite large parts of this as I know my style of writing isnt very guide like.