TCS: Keeping Control

My trade alts are coming into their own as they steam full speed ahead to slam into Wholesale IV. Once they are there I can reevaluate if they need further training for now or if I have enough market orders to decouple my market alt (who is not a TCS Employee) from the market order part of the store.

While I was away at Fanfest my market got a bit drained. I plugged holes here and there but items still vanished. That is not such a bad thing. Most of it was in the areas of fuel as the ice change announcement came in and people swooped down and cleared out vast swaths of ice materials.

I was fortunate to find out that I had stocks of unlisted isotopes. For some reason I hadn’t put up everything that I purchased. That was good. When someone that I know brought out all of my liquid ozone and relisted it at twice the price. That was bad.

Competition is something that I will have to deal with. It has been my biggest fear in a way.  I am not a very competitive person. The urge to do something just to be better than someone else is not mine. However, I learned that I do not have to be personally competitive to fight my local market PvP. I simply have to be defensive. I want to defend my store and defend the concept and social improvement I am attempting to build. In the same way that I do not increase my prices just because I can I also will fight against markups I do not approve of.

It has led to a good amount of caution. I purchased a large stack of liquid ozone and then started to trickle it out onto the market. I’ve undercut everyone else but I do not wish to throw everything that I have out at once right now. This morning, I noticed that someone else had undercut me by .01 ISK for a few thousand units. That, I will ignore. The amount will be used up quickly. They will gain their ISK and I will continue to list at a price I consider reasonable, causing people to buy me out to list higher or undercut me and list lower.

I believe I am creating market pressure here? I don’t think of myself as anything for anyone to pay attention to. Yet, in this market I have a large amount of ISK invested.  I have to separate my greed to have the market all to myself with my dedication to the market and what I want from it in the long run. Unlike most people who will come and dump some things because the market appears to be active I am all in. It is not that I am competing against them it is that they need the viability I am bringing for it to be worth their while. But because I have so much to list I can control the cost ceiling of many products.

Or so I think. I worry a lot about the competition. However, when I sit back and approach it from a rational position I remind myself that anyone that wishes to enter into the market will have to put a significant ISK and time investment into a market with an already active player. Riding the wave of buyers I have created as they dump stacks of commonly used modules is different from direct competition with the goal of forcing me out.

I managed to run out of cynos yesterday from my stocking attempts right before Fnafest. I got them restocked. Last night was a big buy as I started to work through and relist things. I got it all moved down to the store before bed and I put up a few, important items before I went to work this morning. Over the weekend, I believe I can get things whipped back into shape.

Greed is very hard for me to ignore. I find that I want everything. There is a difference between competition and me being unreasonable. It is not as if the market is not large and full of needs. Someone that I know has been dumping their T2 production for instance. This is not actually a bad thing. It frees me up to buy other things and expanding my offering.  My corpmate that was handling a lot of the missile side of things unsubbed leaving me to catch up with what he was doing. That is part of my weekend project as well.

I’ve also been playing with buy orders on Chella as she acquires minerals for my battleship building projects. I can now use this new found knowledge along with my newly increased buy abilities to start buying back basic items to relist.

On that note, last fall I stated researching blueprints. Some are about done and I’m now in a position that I can start building some of my T1 needs. I don’t have a lot yet but enough that I will be able to bring more ships in at an improved cost for my buyers. I have to far to go with ship stocking still. Battleships and more T2 options are needed at more than the scattering I currently do. I’d love to be in the position of having 5-10 of each ship type listed.

Which reminds me, my large sell orders are going well. Once the store picked up some speed I started purchasing large stacks of steadily moving, cheap T1 modules. I purchased around 300 core scanner probes for instance instead of a smaller order of 20 or 50 once I saw that they were a steadily selling, daily item. They are about half gone. It is where I try to balance not tying my ISK up with making my life easier by not having to restock things every other day.  Because I have such a large selection of items (I currently have around 350  orders tied up for various reasons, not having to restock every single small stack of random thing helps reduce my stress.

Where is the store finically? It is set to break 10 billion ISK shortly. From my orders that are up, ISK in the wallet, and assets unlisted it is about there or maybe over.  Not a bad point as I head into the end of the second month. I’d say that one way or another the store has been a successful endeavor. Now I am doing my best to bring it along and continue to improve upon it. I feel I have shown that there is ISK to be made with a reasonable profit margin.

And really, who the hell is buying all these salvage drones?