Take advantage of market fees to not undercut like an idiot.Follow

Do people not realize this or are they just too stupid to care?

You're putting an item up on the market in Gridania. Currently there is someone else selling it for 3000g in Ul'dah. How much should you put yours up for?

The stupid answer is any amount below 3000g and the lower you go the stupider you are. You do not have to start an undercutting price war with people when you're selling from a different city. If you put your item up for 3000g then anyone buying from Gridania, assuming they're not an idiot as well, will buy your item over your competitor's because the item being sold from Ul'dah will come with an fee attached making their item cost more than yours by default.

Without having to start a price war you've managed to secure an advantage in 1/3 of the market, a 50% chance of selling in another 1/3 of the market and only come out the loser in the last 1/3 of the market all while keeping the price stable for future sales.

Every market covered by other sellers so you lose out on any advantage? Then if you must undercut at least undercut like someone with half a brain and go in small increments. Selling for 2899g moves your item no faster than if you had sold it for 2999g but you've screwed yourself out of 100g and started the price on a downward trend that the next idiot will try and match by putting theirs up for 2799g and so on and so on.

It's... more complicated than that.

Okay, so maybe that Nophica's Wonderbra you're trying to sell is being sold by someone else for 3,000 gil. But how often does it sell? And what does it usually sell for? This is also important to consider.

If people haven't bought a Nophica's Wonderbra in three weeks and the last time it sold, they all went for 10 gil, it could be there's just no market for the product at all, and you'd be better off selling it to an NPC. Then again, maybe it's because they're no longer made and it's now a collector's item which, to right person, might actually go for 10,000 gil, especially if it were dyed pink.

More often than not, however, it's a question of supply. It could be Nophica's Wonderbra usually sells for 1,000 gil, but because the supply dried up, only the one being sold for 3,000 gil is left. It's at this moment, you have to ask yourself, is the supply going to come back, and if it does, is it going to be undercut all the way down to 1,000 gil again, and you better price it sufficiently downward so that you get a good price before the supply returns and ruins your chance to make more than 1,000 gil? Or should you ask for even more... maybe even 4,000 gil, which an anxious buyer might pay if the 3,000 gil bra sold leading them to believe the price is going up, and if they don't get that Nophica's Wonderbra for 4,000 gil now, how are they ever going to get the support for their chest that they need without risking paying even more for it, or not being able to buy it at all?

It's not just about reacting to the current price, but sensing the trend. If you always undercut, you'll never make as much as you could by taking advantage of a weakening supply.

2800-2500-1500 Its a buyers market.I have to make space to sell real items, HQ items.The normal items anyone can make is almost junk in this game. It's all about how frequent is the sell history is. The HQ market is so strong putting materia on normal items does very little to move items. Lots of times if I put what I think is a good price equal with the other sellers the item never moves. I subtract the tax a lot of the times, It looks like undercutting but it makes other cities buy your items. I'm on a legacy server

@OP
I will make sure to undercut you by exactly 1 gil.
EVERY * SINGLE * TIME.

I'll criticize dramatic undercuts, personally.

I Had a T4 crit materia I'd made a while back and they were selling for around 800k in a full, if not near to it price history. I put mine up with like 3 other sellers. Undercut footsies begin. 1g here, 100g there, maybe 5k. Naturally we're hoping to be the first sale. Boom, someone suddenly lists for 450k and the war plummets even further down. Took me roughly 2 weeks to sell that sell that materia adjusting my price maybe every 4 hours on average. Worth the 290k? Well, I would've preferred 750k+.

Lacking patience, I guess.

It means a lot when you don't rely on the AH though.

The fact that I don't like relying on the AH are for some of the reasons posted in this thread. I hate resorting to undercutting and I don't like being undercut. Been through that so much in FFXI that I've become anti-AH.. My argument has always been "why undercut?! It's going to sell regardless at the current price anyway!" And yes you would think "because people want it NOW". It's counterproductive. You also start LOSING gil by doing so, and trying to break even, isn't breaking even anymore.

MMO economies are so complex that they actually use them to study real economics... in fact several people have done so.

My point is that the object you are selling is ultimately worth what someone is willing to pay for it, nothing more.

If you feel that it's worth 1 million gil, and nobody is willing to buy it for that much, then it's really not worth that much and you need to adjust your views.

That's the truth of economics.

Undercutting is just the natural flow of supply and demand, if there are too many Earth Crystals on the AH, and nobody is buying them for 160 gil each for stacks of 1000, then perhaps there's not enough demand for that price to make sense...

If I'm a crafter and I know that the price of said crystals fluctuates, and I can buy them cheaper at another point, or just farm them myself, often I will do just that. So your crystals are not worth the price if I'm not buying them.

Same thing goes for any item really... buyers set the price, not the sellers... you may think the seller is setting the price, but that's just who is placing it for sale at a certain price, the buyers ultimately control the price in a free market.

The taxes on the AH are a whole different story, Most people are unaware that the tax is only paid by the buyer if they buy from a retainer in a city other than the one they are located in. Calling them stupid for not having been aware of a fact such as this is not fair.

I wouldn't call you stupid for thinking that undercutting was bad, or that sellers control the price. I'll simply try to help you understand it better.

A better topic would have been "FYI - Taxes are only paid by the buyer if they buy from a retainer in another city."

You probably would have gotten a ton of thank you's and been rated up through the roof for that... but instead you decided to call people stupid for not being aware...

I use the 99 rule all the time, cause it does really work. But yeah the undercutters drive me crazy when I check history and see a few sales for 4000, list mine for 3999, and come back a day later and find 100 of them between 100 and 1000. Its basically just impatient people wanting instant sales and it spirals. Nothing in the game is that rare either, so unless you find a buyer at an exact moment when inventory is low you'll never sell something high. Gil is pretty meaningless unless you're going for pentamelded 50 gear.

You don't need anything special while leveling because gear is either given in quests or of trivial cost. There's really no point in buying HQ stuff unless you just want to, because in a few hours your next job quest will give you a better weapon for free. Same with gear. Fill the slots and you're good. 50 gear is mostly drops, so again, free. Crafting can be sorta expensive, but you can often gather materials yourself and keep watching the markets because an undercutter will probably sell you what you need :)

Yeah, there is a lot going on when someone chooses to undercut by a wide margin or any margin.

While some sellers are unaware of how the tax system works, it's also true that many buyers are unaware or don't care.

I suggest the latter is the case. When I go to the market to buy something I rarely penny pinch. I buy the lowest listed item. I do not do the math to figure out the tax. I do what's at the lowest point, because 5% isn't worth my time in most cases. I'd also buy over priced XYZ item in a convienent stack rather than buy 5 smaller stacks for less, just because it'll save me clicks and I'll get to whatever task I actually want to be doing, rather than staring at the Market Board.

This economy is shifting, but in no way is it a place where people who want to make money, are unable to do so. You might not make as much as you want to make due to undercutting, or vendors, or bots, or whatever. But there are plenty of ways to make more than enough money to fulfill whatever want you have in the game.

In terms of taxes, I think it's also smart to look at what places like to buy what items. Do goldsmith items sell more in udhal?

I usually like to undercut 1 gil off the lowest price or I do the highest price and sell simply a stack of one. But certainly some buyers are cognizant of taxes and take that sort of thing into account.

For Materia grade 4 I'll warp to the appropriate place before I buy.

Does calling everyone idiots make you feel better about yourself?

Were that the case, they were incredibly sneaky in spreading their sales out over the course of weeks. There were also no real significant dips. Maybe 50k higher and lower. Is it possible they sold a materia or two? Maybe, but I don't see what they gained losing 70k+ 10+ times just to pad the history. Almost seems counter-productive to their operation, no?

As for the other aspect of people not having enough gil for such things, this is where I'd generally emphasize participating in the market could help get you to that point. Of course you wouldn't have 800k if you just ran off story rewards. Are you out there generating resources as a gatherer or slaughtering mobs like sheep or boars? If not, then of course money's gonna be tight. And to be honest, I actually found your suggested tier costs a bit insulting to those who do take the time to produce things. 100g for a T1? 50k for something you probably spent 1/4 in resources to produce and then gamble with the RNG to not get a T3 or elemental materia? I'm sorry, I can understand why the buyer benefits from a cheaper market, but sellers need some coin, too. If not, production stops. And while it's easy to assume some phantom person will step in and pick up the slack, there's a part of me that thinks no matter how much some may try to correlate MMO economics to reality, it'll never quite jive because there ARE factors missing. In turn, some economies may suffer simply because they're not fun to participate in as a player not wanting to do their best RMT craft bot impression.

But economies suffering also have another issue, particularly in the endgame inferiority department. Not many want to spend hundreds of thousands of k, perhaps even into the millions to make gear that's inferior to drops. It's basically a self-fulfilling prophecy when a dev sets that wall.

This is all very complicated. I think the market is broken up into "I'm paying attention, I care, I want to make the largest return possible." and "I would like to sell this item now, I don't care, I have a fair amount of gil, which makes me care even less."

These two don't get along. The important point is that one party is going to complain and rail against the heavens themselves that BobTheRetainer cut the price of Garbage Rock of Whatever in half. Trouble is... Bob's owner couldn't give a single fig what you think. If it all burned to the ground they'd shrug and walk away. You can't really reconcile or fix that using market forces alone. The other party in this isn't motivated to change or even engaged in the conversation.

That being said I know it sucks... I'm a miner and I haven't mined in... a while. No point. Everything sells for peanuts only to be turned into a crafted something or other to sell for substantially more. The mining community is allowing itself to be taken for a ride and they've no interest in changing that apparently.

Edited, Dec 5th 2013 2:34pm by Furiousnixon