Please Undercut Wisely

[Inquisitor]

Not only is supply effectively infinite,<snip>.

The supply of materials is indeed effectively infinite, but so is the supply of gil.

The economy of FF14 is never going to really stabilize as long as there are armies of bots making the market price of some items (shards being the most obvious) lower than they would be if they were only being gained legitimately.

[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.

[indira]

all people have to do is undercut one gil to get to the top of the list. not undercut to 10% of its price, im pretty sure people botting are just throwing away stuff like that..

[Zeronic]

Once again I will say that I hate undercuttings. I have tried a couple of things to counter this but to no avail. The are a couple of reason a free market doesn't work.
- You don't make wares to make a living. Lets say this were a game like sword art online where you literally live in the world. If you don't make enough money you will starve. Would you undercut? Yes, but not by such a huge amount that it wouldn't make a difference. After all, you need to earn something decent.
- There is no difference in quality. If I find a watch, and it would cost only 10 euro's, I doubt the quality of the watch. Perhaps I would buy it, just because it is only 10 euro's but I wouldn't really use it since I think it will break easily. Out here the only difference is HQ/NQ. Where NQ is still sufficient anyways for most of us. If someone has the same item for half the price. I would buy it since I cannot doubt the quality since it is just the same.
- No control on the market. IRL, in my country at least, you cannot drop prices below a certain margain, not only because the reasons above + it cost you something to buy it (or the materials) from elsewhere. But because the goverment well. governs it?
They make sure there is fair price region. Stunt once in a while, thats ok, but in the end if you have competition it again comes down to quality since you cannot drop the price too far below your competitor since it is not allowed.
These are just some problems we have with the market we have now. I am sure if I would drink my coffee and try to wake up I would come up with more... but not for now