Do you chase the top of the pricing queue?
If someone undercuts you, do you undercut back, or do you wait for the market to correct to your price?
With the broker relations patch, frequent price changes will quickly erase your profit margins. If current market is substantially above my floor price, I’ll list there - only need to sell a couple of items at that price for the additional profit to cover the relist fee. If the price drops, I’ll move directly to my floor. At that price I’m still making a decent profit and the product will sell reasonably quickly.
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it depends
unless you get undercut again. Depends on what it is.
If you price your product for profitability, you will always be undercut again, but there are limits or prices would have dropped to 0 and stayed there a long time ago! Commodity markets are cyclical - if you set your price mid-cycle, the market will come to you.
An exception would be a period of deflation where you’re selling into a falling market - that’s a poor time to be a producer. If you’re selling into a rising or stable market - the expected outcome if CCP is creating scarcity - simply wait for the market to come to you.
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What about buying?
If you’re offshoring your buy orders at a structure with 1% brokerage, your relist fee will be .25% of the order value - if you’re listing in a station with 3% brokerage the relist (buy or sell) will be .75%. That can get very painful very quickly. If you set your price close to fair value in the first place it will be difficult for people to undercut you and still make a profit - not that that will stop some people, they’re playing a game - not running a business, and really don’t care if they’re making a profit but those orders tend to clear quickly.
If you try for a windfall when the market price is out of line, you’re taking a gamble and will probably need to relist.
What about people selling loot from ratting salvage and explo? It was only their time to harvest said items so I find people are often very willing to undercut whatever is listed.
A lot of those people sell to buy orders - it isn’t worth their time to manage sell orders and they likely haven’t trained the market skills. Market aggregators - or corporate buyback programs - give those people a convenient way to dispose of their loot at a discount.
If stuff is priced below market it will usually sell quickly and the market will return to normal, If people are consistently selling below market then that will become the new normal price. If the price drops below production cost, rational players will stop making it, supply will dry up and prices will rise to the point where the product is worth building.
At least, that’s the theory and most of the time it works. In Eve there are people who build because they want to and don’t care about profitability - it’s a game, not a business. There are also huge stockpiles of practically everything and people selling those stockpiles may be working from a much lower cost base than the rest of us. The problem is infinite, free storage - it costs nothing to build when materials are cheap and store the product until prices rise. Wouldn’t surprise me if the ecosystem team introduces a rental fee for storage space.
Good point and a lot of talk about storage in the last ecosystem CCP stream. I trained some of the market skills because I would rather sell at the lowest station price verse buy orders.
I find the EVE economy and player driven system interesting/entertaining.
Uhm… you’d rather sell at the lowest station price?
Lowest sell order not buy order.
And do you chase that lowest price?
Depends on the amount of orders ahead of mine, the cost to relist and how long that order has been up.
What value do you assign each of those variables? Which is the most important?
It really depends. I don’t use a spreadsheet for selling loot. I usually just look at how many orders are ahead of mine and the volume of sales.
If I come back after a few days and see 10 orders with 1000s of items I realize that I won’t be selling mine for a long while so I then make an assessment on relisting or letting it ride.
Items that are worth more I will sometimes hold off on. Smaller items with less value I may just move to the top.
Sometimes I end up with just a bunch of junk and its better to reprocess it for ore.
So far I haven’t seen anyone who has any type of system for making a lower price / keep the price decision.
It sounds to me like everyone here makes that decision on the spot, using some type of “instinct”.
Which is usually another word for emotion.
Is that right?
It’s because it’s a “feel” thing, not a “science” thing.
You have to be in that market to feel that market.
You’ll get a feel for how many times you need to relist in order to sell quicker.
You’ll get a feel if relisting eats all your profits and you never make a sale.
In THAT case you probably should never have relisted, you should have waited for the market to come to you, as someone said.
Just depends on your requirements. I’d say the “BRACKET” for a producer would be the next production lot.
If you produce X per week, you want to sell X per week. If you can’t sell X per week even relisting until you have no profits, then the remainder is how much you are OVER what you SHOULD be producing.
Just be part of a major nullsec alliance and you’ll be able to tell when the market’s gonna shift because an alliance needs to move X amounts of Y and Z modules to fit out their doctrines. No “emotion” involved. Just simple politics.
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Further expanding on Alistair’s response:
Instinct isn’t about emotion - it’s having an intuitive understanding of the patterns observed without necessarily being able to articulate all of the components that are being observed and guiding the decision.
The more observations you make, consciously or unconsciously, the more likely you will be able to accurately project future market performance. Spending time to research the market and absorb data gives a wealth of information for your subconscious to weigh against other observations that you may not be actively considering but are still an influence on your interpretation of market conditions.
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