Please Undercut Wisely

[Tupsi]

-snip-

Thing about certain mats is, they're sold on vendors and a lot of the early ones, i.e table salt, is insanely easy to make unless you want HQ ones then of course you'll expect to see it decently priced, otherwise on my server at least people sell table salt based on 2x mat items + shard costs. Since you can make table salt at level 1 cooking, there's no reason to buy it, much like in XI people make profit off of lazy people.

Remember Distilled Water? In Jeuno there's a vendor RIGHT NEXT to the AH that sells it for a handful of gil, people made hundreds of thousands of gil on people who didn't go to the vendors lol, same concept here - Stuff like Diremite webs is expensive because of the only set of spawns that drops it and is 99% of the time botted. I sell for Mat + Shard cost in cooking, especially since most is from vendor or easy botany, yet people undercut to the point you no longer make a profit and it's just a mat burn at that point.

[Molly_Millions]

The best example I can highlight.

Before the WP myth tomes change, I used to make millions of gil off that place. Most people just didn't care about the chests, so after they'd leave, I'd go tag them. I was selling the sword from the chest in the square room for as high as 60k. The SCH and Bard items also sold really well.

Minutes, literally, before the servers came back online after that update, my PSU fried, and I was offline for two weeks. I came back figuring I could probably still get 5000 gil out of the sword, and a few thousand for the others.

Every one of them was under 100 gil. At that point, the only reason to list them is generosity.

There is no demand for those parts. We literally have 37 bloody bardiche heads in our FC chest. It's like the pets. When everyone has one, who's going to buy one?

[Taaz]

Well, the other side of that coin is i hate having to sit on my retainers checking them every 20 minutes just to see someone has undercut me by 1 gil. So i drop the price by 1000 each time i undercut/am undercutted. Eventually those HQ Crafting gear are down to 3k apiece and people decide the market isnt worth their time. So they move elsewhere, and i get back to peace and money making.

[JagerForrester]

When is prime time for your server? Prime time is a higher percentage of players online, more of a chance to sell the item and the other sellers are too busy grinding tomes to baby-guard their sales.

That's when I undercut, and based on supply, that's how much I undercut, just because I have the luxury of gathering my own materials for free, and the MB isn't my prime source of income, leves are.

[Haibel]

UNDERCUT ME AND ILL UNDERCUT YOU TO 1 GIL !!!!!

Undercut me to 1 gil and I found me some sweat shop labor.

[Astarica]

Just because a bunch of guys isn't selling stuff at X gil doesn't mean you've to follow the same thing. Usually by checking market history you can get an idea of whether something is selling AT ALL at the given market price. Often times, you can easily verify that nobody is ever selling anything at the current lowest price just by when the last sale occurred and it'd be a waste of time to put a X-1 gil which not only is going to get undercut immediately, but it won't even sell even if it wasn't undercut.

From my experience with the market I often have to go to at least 80% of the current price before the said item sells at all (easily verified by the market history), and sometimes I undercut by more than that just because I don't want to waste too much time by the market board to tweak prices.

[HumsterMKX]

Well I remember selling rose gold ear screws a few weeks ago 800k. Lets just say price wars. Ended with me selling at 380k.

[Lyrinn]

The way I see it, the market is an unsustainable system. Being able to level all DoL and DoH classes to 50 means that at some point, be it next month or 10 years from now, everyone will be able farm or make whatever items they need and little to no market interaction will be needed (we're already seeing effects of this) outside of rare mob drops (e.g. pudding flesh). This means that there's limited profit to be had.

When there's limited profit with a market like this, there are two goals: make as much personal profit as possible, and deny competitors their profit. People who massively undercut are stupid for failing the first objective, but people who complain about being undercut are just as stupid for failing the second.

Don't like it? Play smarter, move on to a different market, or just quit altogether.

[Seig345]

I was gathering alligator pears for the exp, and when I went to see what they were going for on the market, there were countless stacks foing for 1 gil per pear... Well that's stupid, even if the NPCs only offer 1 gil per pear, you might as well vendor them and get your gil faster. "Well, maybe they just sell really fast" I thought, and hey, helping crafters willing to use the market instead of gathering themselves, whatevs" well, even though I put my stacks up for the same amount, which was as low as you can go, none of them sold, not even the smaller split up stacks...

Basically, there's an NPC out there with a LOT of pears... I hate pears... (Also, if I usually sell stacks of material for 50-60gil each, and there's stacks up for 10, I still put mine up for 50-60, those cheaper stacks get bought up quick either by people who'll use them, or are playing the market and putting them back up for a profit anyway)

[Lstkaws]

If you are worried about profit margin; you need to vertically integrate. Own the supply and manufacturing. I normally farm my own materials so when I make something it is all profit minus repairs.

The only exception is when I am mass synthing for materia. In this case I need to be wary of how much shards selling for as this is my only overhead. I NPC the mass produced product which actually cover my repairs with 700 or so gil to spare. It can get a bit dicey if you do not get lucky with the materia conversion, but that is why watching the price of shards is so important.

I want at a minimum 20% profit margin. I can expect that when the market is low. If I am lucky and the market is good I can expect several times that.