market manipulations 101
Currently, I’m successfully manipulating the local market in meta 4 shield extenders. This means that if you have purchased a meta level 4 shield extender in the (classified) area that I’m currently exploiting, you paid far, far more than you should have. And yet, you did it, didn’t you?
I find this fascinating. What’s more, it turns out to be far easier than I would have expected. There are many systems which are trade hubs, from local trade hubs, to the grand daddy mac of them all, Jita. In each of these systems, there is ALWAYS more than one station to conduct business at, and yet, the market seems to gravitate to just one, in each of these cases.
So - I’m selling shield extenders in two of these stations within one of these systems. Any time someone tries to undercut my price, I buy their stuff and put it back on the market at my price. It takes capital, but that’s what I have as a trader, and this is how I wage war. If you want stuff at a better price, you have to travel 10 hops to get it. I figured that was enough insulation. I was right, but it seems that that’s overkill.
Like I said, I’m selling at two of these stations. At the major hub station, I’m selling at a markup of 1000%. At the secondary station WITHIN THE SAME SYSTEM I’m selling at a 30% discount, just one unit, but I replace it if it sells. So far, I’ve sold 30x as much at the higher price because people don’t want to undock, warp, and redock to buy the cheaper one.
I know what you’re going to say - people want to fit their ships where they are, or they want to buy more than one and fit a the same time… but the data don’t lie, and they tell me that most people buy just one unit at a time.
Now, I know people are lazy, I’ve been selling Scordite at a 500% markup in the same station that I know there to be a plotline quest that requires it for a long time. It’s a good gig, but the total ISK we’re talking about here is about 50k per transaction. I can understand that kind of lazy. This new thing, with the shield extenders… the difference here is about 1M ISK per transaction. Maybe I’m cheap, but it’s worth a million ISK to spend an extra 30 seconds to me.