Can you buy from one station and sell the item at another with a higher markup?
yes you can. whether someone is willing to buy the marked up item is another matter though.
Yes, but you have to haul all the stuff from A to B.
Well - you can also pay someone to haul it. In fact there are people who just play the game to trade and never undock their toons.
OK:
Yes, but someone has to haul all the stuff from A to B.
Iâve not (or very rarely) been involved in inter-station trading, but it is a good way of earning a living. Iâm a manufacturer - there are significant overlaps: I have âvalue addâ steps in the business chain which is where I make my profits, not on leveraging market differences.
The general approach is âidentify an opportunityâ then âbuy the targeted items, move it to the sell point, sell itâ. Which makes it sound really easyâŚ
Opportunity: The market in New Eden is regional - you can not see, in game, the market orders in a region you are not in. However people do provide tools for this: Eve Marketeer for example. There are also tools that use this wider data to identify where there may be profitable trades, I used to use Eve Central, but that now appears to be off-line. I said I rarely traded!
Buy the items - you will normally want to do this with Buy orders. These are âoffers to buy items at a priceâ and are normally lower than the âoffer to sell itemsâ Sell Orders that people put up. Eve is a brokered market where âoffers to sellâ are matched to âoffers to buyâ. Youâll get used to it.
Transport it to where you want to offer it for sale. This can either be âhaul it yourselfâ or put up a courier contract - either a public contract âI will pay anyone X ISK take this cargo from A to Bâ or as a direct contract to a haulage operation such as Red Frog or PushX.
Then you want to sell the item for (ideally) a profit. Again, either directly to someoneâs Buy Order (lower price) or by offering it for Sale as a Sell Order.
Tips:
- Make sure there is actually a demand for the item you are trading. If thereâs only one sold every few days you could be waiting a long time to get your money back.
- Keep records so you understand what profits you are making on what items and over what timescales. This is useful intelligence for a trader - this is the real value you are building, donât expect people to give that kind of information away for free!
- Markets vary over time - what is a good trade now may not be good in the future. Understand the trends and the cycles for some items in the market. Watch what changes are happening and what may then become in demand.
- Trading can be capital intensive - especially if you are trading large volumes of items with modest turnovers. Your capital can be tied up in orders for quite some time. Start small and donât over commit yourself.
- Train the skills that reduce taxes, improve the standings that reduce brokerage at the markets that interest you.
- Donât put a lot of expensive stuff in a ship - you just become a nice target for pirates and will easily loose the lot. Use a haulage company and put a good and realistic collateral on it. I donât carry more than âa few million ISKâ in a T1 industrial such as a Bestower, for expensive or bulky loads I pay PushX for carrying the risk.
Inter-regional trade is common and you can make a good living playing the buy/sell spread between regions. It used to be easier when there was a direct connection between the two largest trade hubs - Amarr and Jita. That connection is now broken but there are still lots of opportunities to profit through arbitrage. Just make sure you factor in all the trading frictions - seller always pays the transaction tax. Person placing the order always pays the brokerage and relist fees.
I made more ISK faster than by any other method I had tried the few times I successfully cornered the market on an item I could see was selling cheap at point A and expensive at point B.
I had enough ISK to get started though, thatâs important. Often the margins are fairly small, at times I had to spend 500 million in order to sell for 600 million to make âjustâ 100 million - but thatâs not a bad return for a few jumps work I think. Repeat that over the course of a few days and youâre golden.
Sadly you canât very often reliably corner the market and find a product where no one else has noticed the price differences.
Good luck.
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Absolutely. In fact that is a good way to make isk.
One can start small and build up. Any size ship can be used to begin inter-regional trading as long as your goal is to start building up and learning rather than to try and get rich quick.
Use evemarketer.org , find something that is selling for more in one place than another, buy it, fly it to the place itâs selling for more - profit.
Also;
- Learn how to try and avoid getting blown up.
- Donât be greedy. The juiciest profits are on deals you will not be able to compete with the folks doing those yet. Aim for the medium-profit deals, they will be more available and completeable.
- Maybe look into filling buy orders. You have to be fast or someone will fulfill it before you do. Always make sure the buy order is still open before you get the item somebody wants to buy and take it there to sell to their buy order.
- Donât forget this is a game not a job. If you are not enjoying something - donât do it.
Absolutely this.
You donât need a lot of ISK to have fun and itâs not a scoring mechanism.
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