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How to Industry
- Use buy orders to buy production materials
- set up buy orders in locations that are convenient for sellers (you can typically pay them less in exchange for the convenience)
- Research your BPO’s ASAP
- Build in stacks of 10
- Use Decryptors for invention when appropriate
- Build out Upwell structures that provide relevant bonuses
- Generally try to avoid building in systems with high industry indexes
- Use sell order to sell finished goods
- Set up sell orders in locations that are convenient for buyers (you can typically charge more in exchange for convenience)
- Sell out Upwell structures to minimize fees and taxes (unless it’s a major market hub, then you might want to stick with the NPC station, as most people will just go to that)
- Train skills to reduce NPC fees if trading out of an NPC station
- Further reduce NPC fees by increasing standing (either do it yourself, or pay @Archer_en_Tilavine’s standing improvement agency to do it for you).
- Not an issue if selling out of a major trade hub, but people like to do one stop shopping (i.e. don’t just stock core probe launchers and expect people to make a special trip just to save 5k isk. Stock exploration frigs, probe launchers, scanner probes, scanning rigs, and so on).
- Use safe hauling practices.
- Identify and alleviate bottlenecks (research slots, industry slots, market slots) by training skills or training up alts.
- I liked to keep one stack of goods in reserve at market. As soon as one stack sold out, I’d put up the next one, and then start building another. That way, I always had those market slots working for me.
- Keep 10% or so of your market slots in reserve. When someone starts trying to undercut you, use those extra market slots to put up additional small orders. When you update them, it will cost you much less to update your order than updating his will cost him. For example, say you have a 10 million unit buy order for veldspar and some starts trying to “overcut” you. Don’t update that 10 million unit order a bunch of times. Instead, create a new 500k order, and update that one until it gets filled. Then create another one. He might start creating small orders as well, but you’d be surprised how many people just give up.
- Be relentless with your competition. Make them feel like they can better spend their time elsewhere, rather than spend it competing with you.
- This strategy is good for smaller trade hubs, where people tend to update their orders right after logging in and/or right before logging off. The bigger trade hubs have a lot more competition, and people tend to update orders more frequently. So this strat isn’t as useful there. Anyway, try to identify competitors and their orders (they’ll generally update all of their orders at the same time, and in alphabetical or reverse alphabetical order). Then put all of those items in the same market quickbar folder. Then, whenever you notice that a competitor is updating orders, you can go right behind him updating all of yours. (The buddy list used to be called the watch list (not to be confused with the fleet watchlist), and would give you alert when people logged on or off -didn’t matter if they had also buddied you or not. It was amazing, as it would basically give you an alert that it was time to update your orders. As it stands now, you have to periodically check in on your orders to still make sure you’re good.)
- Some people can be baited into selling for below production costs. I think this is due to a combination of frustration and using online industry calculators. I, however, made my own spreadsheet, and could easily see production costs for everything I sold. Thus, I could quickly identify if someone went too low in an attempt to stop me from undercutting them, and would just buy all of their ■■■■ and relist it at a higher price.
I’m sure I’ll think of more stuff later. But that’s enough for now.
And no, HS industry is not dead.