How to Undercut

[Vhailor]

It seems like a lot of people need a lesson on this.


1. Evaluate the prices.

2. Go 200-500 Gil lower first. Do not just drop it by 10,000 Gil. You do want to make money right?

3. Your thing gets overshadowed by lower prices. No big deal! If everyone priced at lower increments, instead of being desperate, we’d all get similar profits from that item. Unless it becomes more common however. Items demoted to being common will naturally fall in price.

That’s it. It’s simple. Please don’t undercut obnoxiously.

Not my personal system. I do the following:
(a) Evaluate the price of items listed
(b) Evaluate the price of items sold over the past couple of weeks
(c) Determine a price relative to both that seems fair

Also, a bonus step: if anyone undercuts me by a small amount repeatedly, I'll drop the price to the floor. Because I don't care about individual items, and it pisses me off when I get undercut. I also refuse to price my goods at weird increments; below 10K gil I'll generally go in increments of 500, and above 10k it's increments of 5000. This occasionally causes me to undercut people who have reasonable prices, because 50,796 is just an annoying number to me.

Edit: As an aside, I really despise that SE moved away from FFXI's price-blind system. It's contributed to tremendously erratic markets, ones that are prone to wild price swings in the space of hours or days. I'd welcome a bit more stability.