Undercutting

[Nyalia]

High value items have limited demand. There might be one or two people who will shell out an absurd amount of money for a super expensive item, but quickly the value drops to what the next person is willing to pay. The key to making money from crafting is to get your stuff sold, and the key to making lots of money from super-expensive endgame crafts that were just released is to get your stuff sold first. Or at least, before all the people who want one have one. If everything is sitting at 5m and no one is buying, and then someone undercuts to 3m and it sells, that person did not just lose 2m. They gained 3m, where the people who were sitting at 5m gained nothing. With the undercut product sold, they can go back to listing their stuff at 5m, but if it didn't sell before, it's still not going to sell now.

Most importantly, it's important to understand that an item's value to you is not the same as its value to another. People undercut for all sorts of reasons, and people do large undercuts for all sorts of reasons. If a product is selling very sparsely at 5m and someone is undercutting you by 1gil every time you undercut them by 1gil, but you have a full time job and only play a couple days a week, you aren't going to ever be able to sell your item at that price. You need the item to come down to a price where multiple people will purchase the item in short order so after the undercutter's product sells, yours sells before they have a chance to re-craft and re-list. Or, you have to lower the price to a point where the item isn't attractive to full time gamers who undercut so they'll move into another market. That'll slow the undercuts and allow your product to sell, even if you don't log in every day.

People with fewer sale slots and less inventory space also value throughput more than people who have purchased tons of retainers. If you could sell an item that costs you 2m to craft at 5m once a week, or sell that same item for 3m five times a week, selling it for 3m makes you more money over time than keeping it so expensive few people want to purchase it.

Dealing lucratively with the markets in a game like this involves figuring out the calculus of supply&demand throughput offsetting the craft's cost in gil and time. Different people do that math differently from you. I'm someone who undercuts by 1m at a time if the item is selling for 5-10m and someone undercuts me by any amount for reasons explained above, until the item is around 2m. Then I only undercut by 500k. I'd much, much, much rather sell 10 items at 1m profit each than 1 item at 10m profit.

[BloodPact]

People undercut for all sorts of reasons, and people do large undercuts for all sorts of reasons. If a product is selling very sparsely at 5m and someone is undercutting you by 1gil every time you undercut them by 1gil, but you have a full time job and only play a couple days a week, you aren't going to ever be able to sell your item at that price. You need the item to come down to a price where multiple people will purchase the item in short order so after the undercutter's product sells, yours sells before they have a chance to re-craft and re-list.

This is my take on it. I don't play all day. And whenever I craft something expensive or get a good item via retainer or drop I usually list it just under the price of the cheapest. But almost always there are sellers watching the market like hawks (you can see them re-list theirs like 3 minutes after I put mine, that sort of stuff). The time I spend in game I'm most certainly not going to spend in from of the market board. So, I'm okay with making half of it, most of the item they aren't, and if they are, cool, the price keeps rolling down. My FFXIV experience is 0% reliant on Gil.