Undercutting

[hqdm]

After all, what's better? Putting an item up at full 'normal' price, and waiting up to a few days for a sale, or lowering the price a little and guaranteeing a quick sale?

You have a valid point, as do most of the people in this thread, but this is a bit of a misconception in regards to expensive/slow moving items with a wide profit margin.
From a seller's perspective, I wanna milk as much as I can out of a single item, and so I'll resort to minimal undercuts to preserve the price. It's fine if you don't.
But doing 25k, 50k undercuts on an item that moves so slowly doesn't guarantee a sale, because people will invariably check their retainers & see the undercut before the item moves, and then undercut you by 5g or whatever.


It should be expected that you'll get undercut, regardless of what you undercut by, on items that basically print money.

Thavnairian Onions are a good example. They've dived about 500k in the last week or two on my server because some bright bozos keep trying to do "quick sale" undercuts.
The material cost to produce an onion lies around 170k assuming 14k soil (plus excessive growth time).
I won't complain (too much, heh) if you do, because it's still massively profitable to sell an onion at x-25k, but it's devaluing the time (plot & player) required to generate it unnecessarily, because with a margin that wide coupled with slow rate of sale, people will happily still undercut you. There's no advantage gained when an item meets those criteria.

For faster moving items, sure. It's certainly a feasible tactic.