For those that buy/sell things...

Fuzznutts - Sanctuary

Just a quick question for you all you that catshop. Like everyone else in the game, I have a mule that I use to buy and sell things. At the moment it's set up in a beginner city buying low herbs and mats, it's been there for about a month now. For a good while I have been the only person in the area buying any herbs or mats, today a couple of other shops popped up and started buying the same stuff for more money. So here's my question. For those of you that buy/sell a lot, how do you deal with things like this? Do you just move your shop? or do you increase your buying prices or just not do anything at all? Yeah I know I could move, and it's the easiest thing to do, I'm just asking seeing how different people handle the same situation.

Divine_Death - Dreamweaver

I did that with selling Pig Irons in Ether. Was selling for like 2k each xD.

What I did was buying them out, monopolize the area. That worked nicely and people were buying a lot of irons for 2k each. It was well until the demand for iron dropped and that the other shops had 3-4 hundred irons in them.

WarrenWolfy - Sanctuary

Divine_Death - Dreamweaver wrote: »

What I did was buying them out, monopolize the area. That worked nicely and people were buying a lot of irons for 2k each.

I don't really recommend buying people out unless you actually want the items at the price they're asking. If you're just buying them out to eliminate a competitor, chances are you're feeding a competitor, not discouraging one.

In fact, I've frequently tried to bait competitors in hopes that they buy me out. After all, it's much nicer to sell 100 Logs/Iron/Whatever in an instant than to sell them slowly.

Generally, when people undercut/overbid me, I do the same. As long as I can still turn a reasonable profit then I keep adjusting my prices. If somebody bids so high/low that I can't make a profit, then I let them have the market and go try something else. If the goal is to earn a profit, then trying too hard to "win" a particular market is counter-productive.

Looking back, I realize that the major times that I've discovered more profitable markets is because competition forced me out of whatever one I was already in. It can be nice to be earning 5X as much as before, then go back to an old buying/selling location and see once-reviled competitors still doing the same thing for 1/5th the profit months later.

david12345

I remember one time this guy at Lost City, clearly a botter since he had like tons upon tons of iron was competing with me for a spot near the blacksmith, selling mats.

His prices were lower then mine, so I lowered my prices and went AFK. I came back 1 hour later to find he had lowered his prices too, so he was selling for less then me again.

I lowered mine once more but did not go AFK and surely enough a few moments later I see him pop up, check my shop and lower his prices and catshop again.

We repeated this procedure, both of us lowering the prices until we were selling stuff for silly low prices. However what he failed to notice was that each time we did this I was getting closer and closer to his shop.

Once I was close enough, I faked by only changing the prices of the first few items in my store, causing him to lower his prices across the board. As soon as he opened his catshop I bought about 1k irons at 1/3 their real cost, opened my catshop, set normal prices and went AFK.

I never say the guy again.

WarrenWolfy - Sanctuary

david12345 wrote: »

Once I was close enough, I faked by only changing the prices of the first few items in my store, causing him to lower his prices across the board. As soon as he opened his catshop I bought about 1k irons at 1/3 their real cost, opened my catshop, set normal prices and went AFK.

I never say the guy again.

Brilliant stuff! b:victory