FFXIV ECONOMICS 101

[Nyalia]

Undercutting only really hurts your business if you aren't diversifying. You can only sell 40 items at once, and I usually only have ~25 slots for selling crafted good.

What I do is I have a list of ~50 items that I want to sell, and for those, I calculate out a "desireability" value based on the cost, current market price, and how many days ago the oldest sale in the history is to get how much profit/time I'm likely to make by selling it. I use a spreadsheet, so it's not that much work. I do this for the ~50 items and craft/sell the top ~25.

Then, when someone undercuts what I consider the current "maximum" value of the item to be, I undercut them by 10 gil, regardless of how much they undercut me by. When it gets too low, I either reprice my items back at my "maximum" and wait for the price to recover (as it always does), or I pull the items from the market. Then, I find a new item to sell from my list. Later, I'll check if an item's price recovered, and maybe sell it again.

[Nyalia]

A great example of this was when Clothcraft G1 Glamour prisms were selling for 5000 gold when they have a fairly fixed cost of 915, and they were selling so fast the date of the oldest sale was at worst yesterday. But, once other people realized how profitable they were, their sale price plummeted until it was about 1500.

The biggest cost to making these is time, since they can't be quick-synthed. When they got to 2000, I decided it wasn't worth my time and abandoned the market. I took all my goods, stacked them together, and put them up for sale at a price of 4000 each. Eventually, that stack sold, which told me the market had recovered enough for me to go back into it. Meanwhile, I was selling other things that had incredible profit, such as Leatherworking G1 Glamour prisms, where the market worked the same way.

So much profit. Such wow. All you have to do is take undercutting to be a part of the economy and work with and around it, rather than stubbornly against it.

[SevenHeavens]

yadda yadda yadda

I will undercut everyone in the history of forever. The End.