How to merchant?

Beautynbtch - Heavens Tear

I hear some wizz get their rank9 with +10 refine only by merchant. So i need advice from those merchant what items i should merchant, what time i must merchant, what price, should i sell it through catshop,AH, or WC ?

Mayfly - Dreamweaver

Perhaps overhyped, but... WarrenWolfy's guide to merchanting.

LenieClarke - Heavens Tear

Warren's guide is not overhyped, he speaks the truth. the only problem is he's too humble to speak of things he doesn't know, and he's done catshop merchanting only --- we need some experienced AH merchant to write up a similar guide about that method. i'd love to read it, myself.

Hexalot - Dreamweaver

LenieClarke - Heavens Tear wrote: »

Warren's guide is not overhyped, he speaks the truth. the only problem is he's too humble to speak of things he doesn't know, and he's done catshop merchanting only --- we need some experienced AH merchant to write up a similar guide about that method. i'd love to read it, myself.

In my humble opinion (and I'm certainly no warren wolfy)... no serious merchant uses the Auction House to sell their stock other than maybe marginal and/or extremely high priced items because:

(a) your profit margins are faaar lower due to everybody and their dog selling the same stuff (not to mention undercutting each other) therefore it being easier for the "customer" to compare prices and thus select the cheapest. With cat shops on the other hand, the customer has to make more of an effort (other than just scrolling down the page) to visit each shop and compare prices to get the best deal. This generally means that cat shops can get away with higher mark ups on their goods.

(b) You pay a commission to the "auctioneer" for everything you sell which undercuts your profits even further. No such commission exist when you sell via cat shop.

(c) The stuff you are trying to sell expires after 24 hours thus allowing potential customers to miss out on your deals. Cat shops on the other hand can be left up for days on end.

You can however as a cat shop merchanter find good bargains in the AH to sell in your shop later so its not to say the AH doesn't have any uses whatsoever.

Aizza - Harshlands

Hexalot - Dreamweaver wrote: »

In my humble opinion (and I'm certainly no warren wolfy)... no serious merchant uses the Auction House to sell their stock other than maybe marginal and/or extremely high priced items because:

(a) your profit margins are faaar lower due to everybody and their dog selling the same stuff (not to mention undercutting each other) therefore it being easier for the "customer" to compare prices and thus select the cheapest. With cat shops on the other hand, the customer has to make more of an effort (other than just scrolling down the page) to visit each shop and compare prices to get the best deal. This generally means that cat shops can get away with higher mark ups on their goods.

(b) You pay a commission to the "auctioneer" for everything you sell which undercuts your profits even further. No such commission exist when you sell via cat shop.

(c) The stuff you are trying to sell expires after 24 hours thus allowing potential customers to miss out on your deals. Cat shops on the other hand can be left up for days on end.

You can however as a cat shop merchanter find good bargains in the AH to sell in your shop later so its not to say the AH doesn't have any uses whatsoever.

This is good.. but also, please - if you notice your products sell - please keep the same vendor and shop name and location.

We DO pass the word around - when our friends are looking for what you have so also remember your location is importnat for us to be able to say verbally to someone else (by the west teleporter - across from the west banker- etc...)

When a Vendor has good prices, I do go back... alot. Same with people buying mines/herbs/dq from me.

HarmOwnie - Dreamweaver

The guide is excellent but the main problem with merchanting to r9 is explained in the first part of the guide already --> you need to reinvest your capital to generate sales and profits in the future so it will take a quite long period of time to generate enough profit to limit the drain on your working capital. Moreover the time factor is not included. As explained in the guide the observation of the market is crucial to fend off competitors. So merchanting becomes time intensive unless you can not fullfill the transactions that require a large amount of working capital. Things are getting even more problematic if you are unable to set up a permanent cat shop because then the short trade cycles will limit the profits too.

But in general the guide explains it how to merchant up. If merchanting up is too boring for you raising a farm toon for instances will be the 2nd best option. Here you can enjoy playing + make a profit. For instance people here have started charging fees for FC heads from players who wanted to be powerleveled. The problem with things like this is that like the working capital for merchanting certain minimum stuff is required to do that.

greetz harm0wnie

Hexalot - Dreamweaver

I think the main criticism of Warren's guide is that it was simply too over ambitious to a great extent. He spends way too much time on his grand introduction to merchanting and doesn't dot his guide with enough actual examples to get his readers started (protecting trade secrets, maybe ? b:shutup )

Simple things like the buy and hold method. I.e... taking advantage of when boutique sales are on and stocking up on those items that are 50% off or whatever. Then a couple weeks or so after the sale ends, those same items are being sold for double the price. Platinum charms are a good example. Currently selling at 2.7 mil I think on my server. But because they turn over so quickly, once the sale ends and current stocks run out, the price quickly jacks up to 5 million or more in cat shops on west arch. Dragon Orbs fit into this category to a lessor extent too.

Warren had good intentions at heart no doubt but to be frank, his guide was of little to no help to me when it came down to the nitty gritty of starting my own merchanting business. Call it information overload or whatever.

DaKillanator - Raging Tide

I guess wizzie merching > other classes merching b:victory

HexOmega - Dreamweaver

wizzie merching = wizzie farming
farming west district!



merchanting is easy, all you need is coin and an eye on the game changes and worldchat/shops
the big-shots buy "event" items and sell them higher
like buy scroll of tome 500mil sell 550mil
buy cube necky 90mil sell 120mil~
(sell in catshop or worldchat)
catshop can ignore requests for lower price, they come again 5 hours later and buy it anyways... / worldchat reaches more potential customers


uhm AH merching?
thats kinda painful
having the mailbox full of auction duration on several chars- >_<

what i did was picking certain items i check several times daily - buying all low priced ones and increasing price a little so theres profit- also putting in some overpriced to make the regular price look cheap and take advantage of people who only look on first page if there are more than one

many items have seasonal prices, are rarely available at certain times
if you play this game you can figure what affects prices
,everything
Cash Shop Sales, TW, BH, 2x, Time of the day
figured cash shoppers mostly sell gold cheap right after they login, so when do most ppl login?

buy the stuff when its widely available and sell it when its rare, pie easy



---
i made a mistake regarding merchanting, i invested all my coin in a 5.0toon and now i only have 200mil to play with (again), and i r pretty bad/slow at making coin as well

sure, the toon can make me coin when i need it, and i finally have useful chars (sin is op, bm is fun) for squads but i would make more coin if i had the rough cost of ~1.5-2 bil as merching capital >.<