Off market sales etiquette

I've been running those same old tips day after day and very soon I'll hit 30 Hero merits and, hopefully, the big pay off. However, I have a few questions about how transactions are made off market.

First, do sellers ask for all inf up front or do you accept partial down payments?

Do you e-mail the enhancement/recipe or open a trade window so the buyer can examine the goods?

Finally, would I be better off using the market? Does the security justify lower profit?

What I've done is either as above by glee mail.

Alternatively since I have toons on every server, glee mail the enhancement to a toon of mine on the relevant server. Use the trade window for them to give me all but 1BN of the price. Trade the enhancement for the last billion.

Have sold 2 4BN enhs in these ways and bought a 2BN.

I have to point it out - typically saving up merits for a pvp IO is not as cost effective as buying lotgs/miracles for 2 merits each.

Interesting. For purples, it's clearly better to do LotGs in general -- you can sell 10 LotGs or celerity stealth procs, and be pretty sure of enough money to buy any one purple recipe. But if the high-end PvP IOs are worth enough more than that... Yeah.

FWIW, I'd be willing to broker deals and not take a cut, I don't care. Since I'm "that seebs", it's not as though I can just disappear.

Etiquete wise. You always make sure you are guaranteed your inf first before the IO is distributed. Thats most common and accepted.

For example 3 Billion for a Glad armor proc. The person trades you 2 x 999,999,999 for nothing. Then on trade 3 you trade the IO and the last 999,999,999.

Now I've run into a guy recently who tries telling everyone that you trade the IO on trade 2, as he wants to reduce his risk. However its not the preferred way to do it. That particular player is or was trying to corner the market on high end procs - so he was trying to make it safer for himself since he was throwing so much money around.

But in the end the seller gets the benefit of the doubt. As the seller a point of fairness is before the trade begins you open a trade window and show the buyer you actually possess the IO in question. Then close the window and begin the normal transaction.

I've done a LOT of trading with folks. And if I'm selling I would NEVER put up the IO before all Influence is guaranteed first. Most agree with this.

Just as a question on the market, what is the educated guess about when the PvP IOs will start coming down in price? Is it always going to be 'more people are making more characters, so things will always be more and more expensive' or can anyone see a point in the future where the PvP IOs will start coming down in price? Are we trending up or down?

I've never done off market transactions, but I always assumed you did a 1st sale of 2B worth of goods, say 3~5 purps or 10 LotGs or whatever's worth that much *atm* on the markets, then trade them back + another 2B for the PvP recipe. You'd need to roll up alts to meet at a common server and stick the excess inf in wents, use gleemail to setup the intermediary goods, etc, etc, which looks like all sorts of a PitA which is why I never bothered w/off market transactions in the first place. Good to hear there are 4B transactions going on by gleemail only, all on faith.

BTW, I recently dumped a few 50 LotG +rech (crafted) exactly because they were going for over 220M, and in fact, I got 250M for at least one of them. They'll likely stabilize in the 100~150 range again before long so figured I'd take the excess I19-craze cash, since I can churn out all the LotGs I want w/tips (and I will again once I'm done Alpha-ing my 50s).