Merchant Guide?

As much as I'd love to tell you how I make money I would basically be **** myself over. Finding a good niche is getting harder with so many merchants so sorry if I'm coming off as selfish.

The one example I will happily give you is simply buying tokens during packs and selling when packs are gone. This was a sexy, sexy way of making money the first 3 pack releases. The difference between token price during packs and without was at one point 15k. I would move almost a thousand tokens a day when I was selling them for 15k more than what I bought them for. That's 15mil a day. Granted, you needed a decent amount of money to invest to notice large gains, I put everything I had into the tokens and made a killing.

I'm only telling you this as it's pretty much the most merchanted item now. Sure you can still buy tokens at around 10.4k and maybe sell in your shop for 11-12k competitively after packs are gone but even then so many people have taken this route that there are 15+ token sellers at west bank with thousands of tokens. So you while you will still be making money it won't be very much compared to other routes.

As for a guide, all I can say is use the above example and get into a mindset of what you can make money off of. It doesn't have to be huge profit per item but if you are moving 200+ of them a day the numbers add up. Just don't touch my markets. b:angry

Super-secret: Think.
Think about where money goes, think about where other people's money goes, hopefully you'll catch on from there.

Sgt - Raging Tide wrote: »

I see. That would explain why this thread has so little replies.

The lack of replies has probably more to do with this question being asked so many times.

For example, here's me answering the question 4 days ago:
http://pwi-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?p=7761432#post7761432

For you, since you've already got 3 million, I'd say go for "Buy Tokens->Make/Sell (whatever)->Repeat".

What's (whatever), you ask? I don't know, because I'm not on your server, but go take a look around West Archo and see what people are already selling. Chances are you can figure out what's working out for others, at which point you can annoy them by competing with them.

For example, there's almost always a bunch of people selling Oracle 2s, since they sell well. 3s, 5s, 6s and 8s can also sell well if there's too much competition in 2s, but avoid 1s, 4s and 7s because if you check the pricing you'll see they give the least bang-for-the-buck.

Don't limit yourself to Oracles just because I say so, however. There's plenty of room in other markets. Any time you see a cat-shop that's stuffed full of certain specific items there's probably money to be made.

Oh, and don't worry too much about people who are protecting their merchanting "secrets" from you. You don't need secrets. The biggest money is usually in really obvious markets that can't be hidden using secrecy. For example, if somebody has a huge stack of Tiger Packs or Dragon Orb 1s, it's pretty clear what they're doing. Likewise if somebody has 8000 Perfect Stones in a shop that's both buying and selling.

You won't get specific answers because they jeopardize the market of the person doing the answering. But general tips are pretty universal, and several have already been mentioned.

Don't spend all your money. I keep about 95% of my funds in inventory, gold, and coin (to take advantage of any good deals I spot). I only keep about 5% on my character for regular expenses like repairs, personal stuff like new equipment, and treats like fashion. With only 3 mil, you won't be able to keep as great a percentage in your shop, but the idea is to not let your personal expenses eat into your merchanting funds.

Reinvest. If you've grown your 3 mil to 6 mil, don't fall into the temptation to splurge. Say you splurge and blow 3 mil on fashion, putting you back at 3 mil. In the time it takes you to work back up to 6 mil, if you hadn't splurged you probably could have worked the 6 mil up to 12 mil. Reinvest as much of your profit as possible back into your merchanting.

Do the math. It's amazing how many people don't seem to do this even on simple transactions like straight cash shop to cat shop sales. I even made a chart of feather/source of force prices for venos, but it doesn't seem to have impacted the price of these items in cat shops in the slightest. I do this with everything I buy/sell, so I know exactly what my profit margin is. I discontinue the items with too small a margin * volume.

Keep tabs on the competition. Depending on what you decide to sell, this can be as simple as checking a few cat shops nearby, or as difficult as running through all the cat shops in Archo every day to get a feel for market prices.

Beat the competition. If you're buying, offer to pay more than they do. If you're selling, be willing to price for less than they do. What you lose in profit margin, you usually make up in increased volume. e.g. Two nights ago I set up my shop to buy tokens for 10k like all the other shops. I got about 300 overnight. Last night I set it to buy for 10.1k. I got 1900. By paying an extra 1%, I increased my volume by over 6x. If my profit margin were 5%, the extra cost would've lowered my profit margin to 4%. But the 6x increase in volume would've resulted in (4*1900)/(5*300) = 5.07 = 507% as much profit.

Cash shop sales are probably the most straightforward way to make money. You buy items during a sale, then sell them after the sale at a markup. Bonus points for it being impossible to rip people off since you'll be selling at less than the current cash shop price. The downside being your profit margin is subject to fluctuations in the price of gold. If you buy a bunch of gold to tke advantage of a 20% sale, and next week gold drops 25%, you're gonna lose money. Fortunately, most of the time, gold doesn't swing in price that much.

Think about what your customers will want. I'll give this specific away since I'm not actively pursuing it anymore. I noticed lots of TT mat shops by the forges, but very few shops selling the low-cost mysterious skulls, klunky swords, and sacred stones. This didn't make much sense to me since to use those TT mats, you also need these relatively cheap items. So I started selling those, tweaking the price so I sold out of them about as quickly as I acquired them through our guild TT runs. I kept a reserve so my shop was the only one which always had these items in stock. By the time I stopped selling them, they were accounting for almost half a million a day in profit.

Related to the above: It's easier to get away with a bigger profit margin on a cheap item. If you're selling stuff which normally costs 2k, people will probably still buy it at 4k if they're in a hurry. But if you're selling something which costs 100k, it's going to be pretty much impossible to sell at 120k, much less 200k. The downside is the cheaper stuff needs bigger sales volume to generate the same profit.

Also related to the above: In general you want to lower your prices to increase your sales volume. But you have to be able to acquire what you're selling just as quickly. e.g. For TT mats, you probably can't get them as quickly as you can sell them at low price. So a higher price is warranted. Ideally, you will sell out just as you restock.

Don't be afraid to sell at a loss. If you made a bad purchasing decision, get over it and eat the loss to convert it back into liquid coin. It is better to get back 90% of your money and reinvest it into something else you sell for a profit, than to have that money sit locked up in items which sit on your shop for weeks unsold.

WarrenWolfy - Sanctuary wrote: »

For about 4 days I was the only major supplier of Tiger Packs, and profits were around 15-20 million per day.

No you weren't! :P I had 500+ gold when Tiger Pack sale started. Did notice that there weren't many Tiger Pack sellers in the beginning because they were stuck with Corals and couldn't get coins back from them. I took the opportunity and made a killing. I did notice your shop but we were far apart from each other so we weren't in direct competition.

Do you really expect merchants to give away their secrets, if they still have plans to continue doing it?

Merchanting is only "profitable" to a person when he/she screws other people over. Buy Low/Sell High is not far from a "legit" scam -- that is, one that doesn't claim to be something it isn't.

There is no end product (virtual or otherwise, merchanting applies in RL too), it's just transferring money from people. "Profit" here doesn't mean you are making a product (whatever that is, even coin poured into a virtual economy applies) that is appealing to people. Profit means, you LOSE less money than the ones who buy your stuff.

Example: if you sell mats for 500k, and buy the same mat for 200k, you lose less money (200k --> it's what you lose) than the idiots who buy it for 500k. That's where this "profit" comes from. **** people over.

The very definition of merchanting is, that you DEPEND on people who are stupid enough to buy your "higher priced" stuff (and selling it at "lower price" to you).

If everyone was aware of this, merchanting wouldn't be feasible. Hence why people don't want to trade their secrets: they DEPEND on people like you who don't know how to do it. Their whole "model" is based around it.

If you want to be "one of them" just remember that you depend on **** people over.

andrew789 wrote: »

im having a bit of a problum with finding good way to make money as i am i 99 sin i need to be thiking about geting my tt99 gold but i have not been the one for the most luck i was thinking is there anyway of getting money in a fast and help full way to my self ??????????

Merchant and farm or C$.

Necro. b:shocked