The Market gets its fair share

You know I was thinking last night that yes the market is all well and good but one thing I don't understand is why I have to pay to list something, and then, when I sell it, the Market gets yet another cut of my money.

You know, when you pay to list something, that should be it. After all, if you take the item out, you've lost your listing fee.

Of late, some Set IO recipes are going for stupid money, I mean I put a recipe on there for 5000 inf, and sold it for like 5,000,068 or something like that. The market got a nice slice of that. naturally things are so expensive and the moment with some salvage going to regions of hundreds of thousands, and what with the incarnate stuff you need every drop of inf you can get these days. So when the market gets a massive chunk like that out of your final sale... well it hurts.

Especially as I wasn't greedy only 5000 for a lvl 50 recipe lol

Its capitalism. You can always sell it off the market, but it is very convenient to sell it on the market, thus the 10% fee

the market fee is widely seen to be a good thing for the CoX economy because it takes inf out of the system and thereby lessens some inflationary pressure

I didn't consider that. Nor did I consider not using the market.

It is convenient really to just run to wentworths, but prices for even simple stuff there is crazy. I play on EU servers, Defiant. And there was a time a few weeks ago, inanimate carbon rods were selling for 100,000 inf on average. I was like... huh?

Its also quite strange. I wanted to buy a End Mod Recipe. Just a common IO, level 45. It was literally cheaper to go to the university and buy it there.

The Market is a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde IMO. Often its great to grab a bit of this or that which you need for your temporary power or whatever at dirt cheap prices, but some of the things on it are enormously expensive especially to us 6 month veterans.

There are a couple things in play here.

Essentially, the market wants 10% of your sales as a fee. Period.

As has been mentioned, this is actually a good thing from an inflationary
standpoint (inf is made from nothing - without any drains, it would rise
infinitely as would prices until it all crashes into the 2B cap)

However, as you point out, at listing time, we don't know what "sales" amount
is going to be, so there's definitely going to be a fee when it does sell.

The other piece is the listing fee. This is there to favor the buyer (believe it
or don't).

It prevents "list creeping" - ie. repetitively re-listing an item from a high price
to successfully lower prices until I sell it. That technique would allow a seller
to get the maximum buy price out there, or simply not sell at all if nobody
is buying at the price he wants.

Listing fees make that an unviable approach.

Since those fees are 5% of the price you list at, it encourages the seller
to list for a lower price and leave it on the market...

This favours savvy buyers, because, the opposite of list creeping is "bid
creeping" which is highly encouraged, and has no penalty.

Any crazy pricing you see out there is a direct result of buyers who don't
bid creep, and have enough inf to "Buy it NAO" regardless of what it may
be listed for.

That said, if your "crazy priced" item would sell for your list price of 5K and
you paid 500 (10%), your profit is 4500... However, it sold for 5M, and a
500K fee was charged, you still got 4M+ more profit in the second case
than you would have in the first case.

Guess I'm not really seeing the downside here


Cheers,
4

Just wait until the server list merge, I'm sure you'll see a huge adjustment in prices then.

To clarify FourSpeed's comment about the market's 10%:

It remembers what you spent in listing fee , and charges enough when you sell that it ends up at 10%.

Let's say there are bids out there on Deific Weapons at 2 million inf. You have, somehow, 20 thousand inf and 2 Deific Weapons. You list the first one at the maximum you can afford: 400K inf. The market takes your 20K listing fee and immediately sells the Deific Weapon to a standing bid at 2 million . When you collect, the market takes 10% of the total, minus your listing fee.
10% total: 200K inf
Prepaid listing fee: 20K inf
Final fee: 180K

You end up with 1820K (the 20K you started with plus 1.8 million, 90% of the sale price.)

Now you have enough to list your next Deific Weapon at whatever you like. Since you're in a hurry, you figure 2 million inf is good enough. You list at 2,000,000 . The 5% fee is 100K. You instantly sell, again.
10% fee: 200K
Prepaid: 100K
Net fee: 100K
You get 1900K, but you already spent 100K so you are, again, up by 1800K at the end of the transaction.

The only time the initial fee matters is if you decide to list a Deific Weapon for 4 million and then you change your mind. Then you lose your 5%-of-list-price deposit.

As far as spending and earning: There's a Market Self-Defense guide in my sig. You probably know everything in there, but it couldn't hurt to read it. You might have missed a trick or two.

Theres a lot of good information here guys, when I list things on the market, I do put it in cheapish as I kinda work on the mentality I don't want to pay a fortune so you know I try to spread the word.


If I see an item that has a going price of 100,000 I typically would chuck it in at 75,000.

I still make a killing on something that the stores would probably only pay 1000 for, and the other guy gets the item a little cheaper.