Please Undercut Wisely

[OldGeezer]

That doesn't make you a low-life. But if you are selling the finished product for less than what you could get by selling the materials then you are being rather dim-witted. Not evil, but very ignorant.

Who says maximum profit is the only way to roll? I don't buy mats and I'm comfortable with an 80% margin, plus I like making things. I don't need a 99.9+% margin to feel good about a sale. Like others have said gil has very little value in this game. Aside from buying forthcoming housing, gil has limited importance in this game.

Edit 2: Your idea that people who don't gather their own materials are lazy is ignorant and insulting. If you work in a steel mill, are you considered lazy because you didn't go out and mine the iron ore (and coal and misc other minerals used in a particular alloy) yourself? If you work in a car assembling plant are you being lazy because you didn't mine the ore and smelt it yourself? Not to mention the glass, plastics, circuit boards, and everything else that goes into a car. If you run a retail outlet chances are you didn't do anything with the merchandise except buy in bulk to resell in smaller amounts at an increased price. You must think retailers are REALLY lazy.

Companies buy other companies in order to make materials internally and thereby lower their costs. This game allows this too. If FFXIV limited 1 character to 2-3 crafting professions like in other MMO's, crafted materials would be an essentail component to the economy. But they didn't, so crafting materials are optional to the economy. A person can do it all. It takes a little dedication but with the EXP rewards that come from HQ crafting leves it's remarkably fast and very profitable. Youi can grind 5 levels in 1 hour or so with the right recipe. If you're a dedicated crafter and you've only trained one profession so far I'm very curious about what you've been doing. I split my time between questing, grinding alts and crafting and all my main crafts are at level 35-and I'm taking it slow. So yeah, if you're not spending time developing other crafting classes, I wonder what you're doing with all that free time.

[zdub303]

As long as that 7k is enough more than market price of the materials to net what you consider a reasonable profit, then no, you aren't a low-life even though you are undercutting.

Net cost of materials for an Aetheryte Ring on Coeurl atm would be between 900-1200 gil based on crystal/cluster prices. Most items you're still making a 500-600% profit margin on Coeurl, I think most people just perceive that 60 seconds of their time to be worth more than a few thousand gil.

[Zfz]

When enough people undercut "unwisely", the "wise" ones are over-pricing.
In an MMO, the value of an item ultimately is decided by how much people are willy to pay for it.

[ApolloGenX]

Considering you can get diremite easily from both mobs and from leves, there's no surprise that someone came in and blasted the price with volume.

Cutting your profit on a per item basis to quickly move volume is a viable strategy. You might make less per sale, but you can make more per day in volume.

I love how these whiny threads about undercutting keep popping up.

Volume sales strategies only work on common or easily procured products... which is why I find the whining so hilarious. You are crying that you can't overcharge for some common junk, because someone is just flooding the market and taking profit on volume.

Stop pretending you are selling something valuable and trying to gouge. Understand that you are selling common junk, and that if you want to overprice it that's fine...but don't be surprised when you aren't competitive.

When I get bored now, sometimes I just look for "crafters" trying to rip people off in the market and I will flood the market with items at a low price. New players that don't know that it is junk might be fooled and actually get ripped off... so I put stuff out there on the cheap so they can get it and keep leveling. I still make a profit, but I'm not trying to get rich on one sale like some people.

[Astarica]

Stop pretending you are selling something valuable and trying to gouge. Understand that you are selling common junk, and that if you want to overprice it that's fine...but don't be surprised when you aren't competitive.
New players that don't know that it is junk might be fooled and actually get ripped off... so I put stuff out there on the cheap so they can get it and keep leveling. I still make a profit, but I'm not trying to get rich on one sale like some people.

A lot of people can't seem to get over the fact that the item/service they provide is junk and therefore the correct price tends to settle toward junk.

And what you describe really only matters to crafting materials. If you're a brand new player with absolutely no clue how the game works, you'd quickly come to the conclusion that no finished product in the level 1-49 range is worth paying for given you can do FATE while naked. I've put level 40 HQ weapons for 200 gil before and it took a while to sell, and I'm pretty sure I was not being undercut by anyone. In some cases I am the only seller. People simply don't have a need for these things. A lot of people seem to live in this parallel universe where people constantly buy gear upgrade as they level from 1-50 even though there is no incentive to do this whatsoever. You don't need it for FATE grinding, and if you do dungeons, you'll have better.

[ArmorKing]

I love it when people undercut the current trend by 50% in desperation to "sell now".

I grant their wish, then relist their product back to the current trend and enjoy the (basically) free Gil.

Funny thing is, this happened to a friend of mine. He listed at 800. Undercutters went 799, 798 etc. So he listed more at 500, 499 etc. They answered by pulling their 799s and relisting at 450, 449. He bought up/pulled everything under 800 and reposted all at 800 and sold.

There ensued a slew of cursing on /shout from the "aggrieved" undercutter. It was glorious.

[ApolloGenX]

I love it when people undercut the current trend by 50% in desperation to "sell now".

I grant their wish, then relist their product back to the current trend and enjoy the (basically) free Gil.

Funny thing is, this happened to a friend of mine. He listed at 800. Undercutters went 799, 798 etc. So he listed more at 500, 499 etc. They answered by pulling their 799s and relisting at 450, 449. He bought up/pulled everything under 800 and reposted all at 800 and sold.

There ensued a slew of cursing on /shout from the "aggrieved" undercutter. It was glorious.

Well, that can happen when you don't really have much supply. I usually do it with 10 + of items and 10 + stacks of stackables. If someone wants to buy all mine out, that is fine... I'll just put more stacks out there until they stop buying.

[Astarica]

Well, that can happen when you don't really have much supply. I usually do it with 10 + of items and 10 + stacks of stackables. If someone wants to buy all mine out, that is fine... I'll just put more stacks out there until they stop buying.

I don't even understand how the often 'I lowered my price to trick people' thing can even work. It's obviously not possible on anything that's gatherable (the joke's on you for trying to control supply). If you've an item that moves in high quantities, like Fleece, and you had a sequence of say 300 (default) 250 (undercutter) 200 (you), what's most likely going to happen is a third party would've bought up all the 250s and certainly all the 200s since this item moves in high quantities and both you and the undercutter loses to a third party. So is there some secret trade wars over say, Ochu Vines? If the last price is actually near the market price, I've never had a trade war that goes beyond my first undercut, because somebody would've bought it after that first undercut, and if not, the next substantial retaliation undercut will certainly be bought by someone else which makes the ploy irrelevent.

I think what actually happens is that say you got a good that's priced at 1000gil and its market value is 500 gil so nobody is actually buying, so you undercut to 900, then another guy retaliate with 800, and you drop to 700 and then someone bought all your 700 gil stuff thinking they 'won', never mind that none of those items were ever going to sell in the first place. If the fair value of the said item is 1000 gil, the item would never have lasted long at 900 gil, let alone any price lower.

[SarcasmMisser]

I love it when people undercut the current trend by 50% in desperation to "sell now".

I grant their wish, then relist their product back to the current trend and enjoy the (basically) free Gil

I know someone who tried this with shards and got burned horribly when his "correct price" wouldn't sell while the supposed undercutters he was trying to screw got their sales at the end of the day.

Your problem is that you see the "correct" price as whatever other people have listed it at in any point of time, which is a faulty assumption. By that logic you can sell hq 2 star fish at 5 figures while ignoring that no one has ever actually forked over the cash for that price. What a previous poster said about volume is correct, just because fleece is selling at 300 doesn't mean you can sell 1000 and make 300,000. The price is based on a history of sales and that history has a limited volume, so when you want to sell a larger volume than proven in the sales history you have to drastically undercut to provide more incentive for higher volume. If you want to do the whole relisting thing correctly you also have to cut volume while raising the price, I see people doing this with pastry fish where a single one sells for double the amount of one in a stack.

Also your whole scheme makes me nostalgic. Back in Diablo 3 I used to find a market of items in the RMAH that was comically overpriced and never sold, buy one of them from the gold auction house and relist it on the RMAH way cheaper than anything else. My target customers were flippers, people just like you who would think that just because a price is an outlier that it is underpriced. I wouldn't be surprised if many sellers in this game were also depending on people like you.

[Exphryl]

Due to the limit on items you can have up. I undercut a LOT. Doing so will cause me to sell more in a shorter time then selling them at near "market value" and playing a waiting game. Sure my individual gains will be lower per item, but I'll have 5x+ the sales so my overall net gains become very substantial. I'd be more conservative if there wasn't a limit, but I spend my free time crafting nonstop so I have lots to throw up.