New to marketeering, quick questions...
By
Dechs Kaison,
Posted on: 2009-07-07 11:00 in The Market and Inventions
'flipping' is buying something at a low price and re-listing it to sell at a profit.
You don't need to 'corner' the market for this to work, you just need something with fairly wide price fluctuations.
My 'training wheel' example of flipping would be crafted generic IOs. Tons of customers and tons of suppliers who don't care much about profits (badgers).
Any given high-turnover generic IO can usually be picked up for 1/3rd or less of its 'prime time' price. If I'm looking to flip Recharge Reductions and I see they're going for 200,000 when I log out for the night, I'll throw up a bunch of bids between 30-70k, depending on how aggressive I feel like being.
When I log back in later, I'll probably have won a bunch, which I will re-list for, say, 120k. Since I know they're "worth" 200k I want to be enough over 100k to avoid the bargain hunters but enough below 200k to undercut the other flippers.
And yes, players will quite often leap from one round number to the next, especially with small sums like these.
Anyway, that's flipping.
Buy something for cheap, sell it for more.
/edit
a really good thing to flip right now is uncommon salvage- MA has it spiking left and right. I have been successfully buying it up for 9k and re-selling it for 100k+.
the low buy-in makes it good for building a bankroll, or just practicing your flipping chops.
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My City Was Gone
You can try "crafting inspirations" too. That's a very low risk starting out way to build up some cash.
With a level 1 character sell your 2 level 1 damage TOs to a vendor. Go to Wents, sell your Large Green insp. Then offer about 5000 each on 2 Tier 3 Reds. Combine, list, profit.
After that offer about 5,000 inf for not often used tier 3 inspirations (Yellows, Reds, Blues) combine 3 into 1 insp that is used more often, (Purple, Breakfree, Rez) and list it for 100,000 to 150,000.
Near instant profit, low risk, low start up costs. You can easily have a million start up cash by the time you head to Kings Row to pick up your Raptor Pack.
-Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein.
-I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
-When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. - Thomas Jefferson
Flipping is taking something and making money at it, most of it bought at the market (un changed)
Iltats crafted item of the week Blessing of the Zepher KB prot 4 recipe was selling around 30 mil apiece. Crafted it was selling at 60 mil with a spike into the 80's ( target would be get on the 60 mil sale). Is another form of making some inf.
Crafting sells ,you can find big spreads like that all of the time, but also look at the spreads for lower end items. when looking for a Niche like that figure in crafting cost, salvage.
[EDIT: For da Goat]
Lead Squirrel at Dr. E Spider robotic site #643
Nothing saids its your spot like an ourob. Portal dropped on the ground.
Flipping works when you're putting in low bids and listing for Buy it Nao prices.
Crafting works when you're putting in middle-of-the-road bids and listing a different item for a different price.
It's normal to see recipes for 5 million and crafted for 10 million; it's plausible to see recipes for 2 million and crafted for 10 million.
Crafted, pretty much the entire market are Buy It Nao people.
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nit pick:
'flipping' is taking something and reselling it for a profit without modification. Buy LotG recipe, re-list same recipe for more, profit.
Buying recipes and making bank selling the crafted enhancement would be 'craft to sell', not flipping.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
[ QUOTE ]
nit pick:
'flipping' is taking something and reselling it for a profit without modification. Buy LotG recipe, re-list same recipe for more, profit.
Buying recipes and making bank selling the crafted enhancement would be 'craft to sell', not flipping.
[/ QUOTE ]
In another thread the term 'crapping' was the winner for doing this. (I didn't vote for it.)
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
haw!
must have been during my hiatus, I'm fairly sure I'd remember something that naughty. =P
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
[ QUOTE ]
haw!
must have been during my hiatus, I'm fairly sure I'd remember something that naughty. =P
[/ QUOTE ]
I take full responsibility for coining the term...half crafting, half flipping.
To the OP, check out FourSpeed's guide for getting your bankroll going. Worked very well for me. Short version: Buy common IO recipes for cheap and sell them to an NPC vendor for profit. The guide goes into more detail on how to spot your target price for "cheap" etc.
[ QUOTE ]
Once I do memorize the recipes, does this become a profitable enterprise?
[/ QUOTE ]
In short, yes.
Expounding a bit, it's not a "billionaire" strategy. That said, if you get yourself a nice
little "production line" going, it's quick and easy work, with decent profits for minimal
time investment.
It's a 5 minute job, and it's fire-and-forget, so once you get it going, it's in the range
of ~2M+ profit for each set of 10 of them that you craft.
A good steady income while providing a helpful player service. It lacks somewhat
in pure Ebil, but that's what flipping (particularily rares and purples) is for... 
Regards,
4
I've been rich, and I've been poor. Rich is definitely better.
Light is faster than sound - that's why some people look smart until they speak.
For every seller who leaves the market dirty stinkin' rich,
there's a buyer who leaves the market dirty stinkin' IOed. - Obitus.
To be honest, I find "flipping" to be a bit too hard and too risky for a casual marketer. You really need to understand the values of items or you can easily get fooled by a "Last 5" that looks like a good profit margin, but in reality someone just really wanted those items NOW and paid way more than they're worth. The one time I tried flipping stuff, I ended up losing several hundred thousand in Inf. So I stick to buying recipes and crafting for the less risky, but somewhat lower profit margins.
Personally, I started out using FourSpeed's guide. I still use that recipe vendoring method for all my new characters because I can easily get up to around 1M inf with little work and for a level 6 character, that's more than enough for a while.
Then I moved to crafting common IO's. Take a look at Paragonwiki and see what it takes to earn some of those memorization badges. If you're not going for Field Crafter, focus on the ones that you'll be able to make money on once they're memorized.
For example, in a game where AoE attacks are king, people usually don't care much about buffing a skill like Fear that makes the mobs scatter. On the other hand, pretty much everyone wants/needs to buff their damage output.
The calculations at this stage are preety simple. A common IO that sells for 300,000 and only costs 100,000 for crafting fees and materials will net you 170,000 in profit (allowing for the 10% WW keeps).
One tip I'd add here, be wary of devaluing your IO's by overselling. Putting up 10 level 40 damage IOs creates the impression that supply is high, and so the price people are willing to pay will drop. Two ways to counter this: 1) Craft 10, but only put a fraction for sale at any one time. 2) Take advantage of the tiering of ingredients.
What I mean by #2 is that since level 35 and level 40 IOs use the same ingredients (and require the same memorization badge), if you make 5 of each, you decrease the perceived supply levels and keep each level range at a decent price point. This is how I do it when I don't want to have the check the market several times a day.
Finally, once my marketers hit 100M, I moved to crafting the orange recipe IO's. Again the calculation is simple. Recipe for 20M, 2.5M in ingredients and crafting fees, sale price of 35M and I'm making a profit of 9M on the transaction.
Figuring out what IO sets might sell can be a little challenging; so here's what I did. I spent some time sitting in Atlas Park listening to the "LFM" requests. It doesn't take long to figure out that Stone tankers and Fire/Kin controllers are popular to have on teams. So then I came back to the forums and read the latest guides on how to build out those characters. This was able to tell me what sets are going to be popular based on what archtypes/powersets are popular at the moment. Of course as the game changes through updates and expansions, this can change what the "build of the day" looks like; so you'll need to pay attention how new Issues or expansion sets affect the popularity of marketing items.
I've started looking into how to be an ebil marketeer for massive profit, and I guess I'm still not understanding a few things.
Is "flipping" just buying up the entire stock of something and relisting at a higher price? Or is it a more calculated "snipe items at low price and then list them high, waiting for the BUY IT NOW people"?
I understand it takes capital to make capital, so to build up enough inf to start my ebil career I've been crafting generics. Until I actually memorize the recipes, I'm selling them for very little profit because that's all I can seem to sell them for. Once I do memorize the recipes, does this become a profitable enterprise?
Where to now?
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