ok Ebil Marketeers, how do I...

Reclaim my niche in the market. I found an enhancement whose recipe isnt too much work to get ahold of and once crafted was selling for a a nice amount. After enjoying that for a couple weeks someone started selling it for a third of the price. Luckily they cant seem to keep up or they got greedy cause now while it occasionally sells for that 1/3 of what I have mine listed for, now it mostly sells for about 2/3rds. Which still undercuts my price. Supply has also increased to about twice what it used to be back when I first started playing with this particular enhancement.

How do I go about protecting my niche? I already had a couple bids set at 1/3 the price and ended up grabbing one and putting it back on the market for what I usually price it at. But I'm getting tired of seeing all my listings sitting there for weeks now not getting sold and supply doesn't seem to be dropping. So the whole being patient and waiting for whoever else is using this spot on the market to lose steam isnt working. Obviously I need more aggressive tactics. Advice from market masters would be greatly appreciated.

Your choices are:

1) patiently wait him out.

2) aggressively drive him out by slashing prices and taking a loss.

3) move to another niche.

I usually do 1 and 3. I keep my current bids and offers, stop making new offers for that item (or switch to a different level of same item), sell any new crafted items at a lower price, and start bids on new items altogether.

Patience, patience, patience. I've had a niche for a few years now and someone recently has moved in and tried slashing my prices. I've just sat back and let them have their little fun. Let them buy up mine at my original price when they get impatient put more right back on the market and just wait. Eventually someone will either run out of product, money or patience. Try to be the other one.

Right now is a rough time because of the hundreds of thousands of Reward Merits that are turning into a river of recipes. That river is going to slow down, but I don't know if it is ever going to go away.

I've never gotten into a fight over a niche and stayed with it, so I can't give advice on that. I do believe you should never have only one niche. Don't go crazy like some of us and try to be in every niche in the market, but three is a good number. One dries up, you can find another while still keeping 2/3 of your profit stream.

Cool, thanks for the advice so far. Hopefully those orders I have out will be filled with 2XP weekend. Looked around and found another set I think I want to play around with. Best part is I should be able to get a good supply without using A merits. So I wont be time gated and I can actually save A merits now.

Edit: I'm debating if maybe I'm better off using AE. It takes my brute 15 minutes to make about 15 mil plus salvage. So prolly about 25 mil after selling. I dont think I could match that speed with the new niche I wanted to try and I did the math and AE would take the same amount of time (inf/minute) as the old niche if the recipe sold for its best price.

Mulitple Niches? Definitely good advice. Patience? Absolutely.

That said, one thing I tend to do when working a niche I prefer to stay in is:

Keep some lowball "protective" bids out there.

So, say for instance I've got a "production line" running on L35 DMG commons.

They typically run around 350K, and cost about 50K to produce.

In addition to my listings, and stack bids on salvage, I'd also place a few 35K-50K
lowball bids on the IO's themselves. This does 3 things for you:

1> You can augment your inventory with bargain IO's at your normal costs (or less),
so your expenses stay stable. Flip those bargain IO's at your normal list price.

2> You tend to clean out the bargain under-cutters, but better yet, in a way
that discourages them - any "bargains" you picked up (probably) lost them inf
as they likey just filled your low-ball bids. Over time, that can be effective.

3> You also protect your price point as you are cleaning out bargains, and keeping
the majority of listings nearer the Equilibrium Price Point(ie. 350K). Keep in mind,
you're *not* trying to corner the market, and you're not trying to arbitrarily
raise prices above where they'd normally tend to be - you're simply trying to
stabilize that EPP by keeping the bulk of listings at that price (if that makes sense).


Over the years, I've found that a pretty good strategy for remaining a key player
in a particular niche.

That said, it's important not to get too caught up in it, and tie up too many
of your market slots.

Also, it costs comparatively little to simply find another niche if the one you're
in isn't performing well.


Hope that helps,
4

Hope you are in my niche, because I have no problem selling my enhs for 1/12th of what the average sales have been for, and paying 2 times as much as the highest recent bid on recipe. That puts me at effectively selling for 1/24th of what the average market price is.

Bring on your complaints! I walked a mile each way up and down a hill in snow in winter with holes in mah boots and no hat just to use the bathroom. I'll never let go mah niche!

Basically it was get one alignment merit, use that for the recipe, spend practically nothing making the enhancement as it required no rares, and than sell for onwards of 90 mil. Which was nice. It now goes regularly for 70 mil and the occasional 30 where it was holding before.

I see it this way, 2 A merits gets you a LoTG global which was worth about 150 mil. So 1 A merit should be worth no less than 75 mil. So even the 70 that its currently being sold for is unacceptable to me. And when It was selling for 90+ it was actually doing me better than a LoTG.

@Serial, the example I used is about an hour worth of play time. (Actually I'm incorrect, its an hour for the 1 A merit. Which was getting me 90 mil. An hour of AE will get me roughly the same.) In order to get the enhancement I need to sell I had to run tip missions. I figured instead of that maybe AE would be the better option. Than the money is up front and I dont have orders not being sold. Not really a case where I spend a couple minutes just placing things on the market and than make profit. I have to generate the product first. Dont tend to flip since I usually dont have very much inf on hand. Theres always at least one toon that could use something so I end up burning through what I have.

How so Black_Assassin? My brute takes around 3 minutes to finish the mission I usually do and that arc has that mission 5 times. So after 15 minutes I have around 15 mil plus tickets. I than use tickets for rare salvage and sell that off gaining about 10 mil more. So 25 mil every 15 minutes and around 100 mil every hour. You talking about rolling recipes? Cause I would do that before but its a pain clearing out the junk and than having to spend inf getting the correct salvage and than craft and wait to sell where If I just go straight to rare salvage and sell that I get the inf instantly and can than go right back into AE if I choose. Tho I find it hard to sit there like a robot doing that over and over for very long.

its the difference between 100mill from 1hr or 250-500mill from 1hr i prefer the latter

I think a lot will depend on what you are including in your total earned inf for that hour.


But, I think that with 7 different characters, you could very easily earn 1 alignment merit each day, but it would only take about 6 to 10 minutes, depending on your travel power and load speed. It would be boring, but it certainly can be done.

Just remember, there is no wrong way to make inf - just so long as you're not taking something for nothing.

Ah. I thought you were buying for X, crafting, selling for X+30M or whatever, in which case "X" can float up and down without hurting your profits much.

If you're making a Hero Merit and selling for X+30, it makes a big difference.

As mentioned, there's been a river of merits in the system, so there are a lot of HM's and a lot of supply in general. (I picked up a lot of recipes that normally go for 20 or 30 million, at 5 million apiece. ) Some percentage of those guys roll random; some percentage of those random rolls will land in your niche. What I'm saying is, you may not be competing with just one person, you may be competing part-time with everyone who wants a costume or a black wolf and is ripping into random packs by the dozen.

The good news is, what you're buying for your characters is ALSO cheaper.

Ukaserex's idea about running one HM a day is not a bad one; mine don't take "6 to 10 minutes" but they're not much over 12.

I'd recommend, if you can take a LITTLE tedium, find a couple of things that you can buy 10-packs of and sell in bulk. Buy for 1 million, craft for half a million, sell for 10 million, give a million to Mr. W, make 7.5 million. If you do that on ten copies, you've made almost as much as you get from that Alignment Merit. And wentporting to Steel Canyon costs 10,000 inf and 30 seconds. So... like, 10 minutes after you get in the swing of things.

The prices will float a little; 75 million is probably optimistic for a 20 million investment.

LoTG prices have bottomed out due to all the reward merits in the system.

Yeah, your OP along with your forum reg-date gave me the impression that you were a relatively new marketeer who had sunk a significant percentage of your net worth into inventory that got devalued. But after your clarification, I'm reminded of a similar situation about how De Beers was trying to handle the influx of synthetics that was dramatically cutting into their niche in an article I read a couple of decades ago. I don't play in that league, so I'll leave it to others to give you advice.

/rich people problems

... or maybe they'll burn so much inf buying purples for 1.5 billion that there won't be ANY inf left!

A man can dream.