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TCS: If you make it, they will come

Last weekend, as we planned to return to Molden Heath, I started to turn the full focus of my market effort back to Bosena. I had dropped down to about a sixty percent attention span while deployed. I'd love to say that I managed both markets at full productivity but that would be a complete lie. I learned that one, steady market occupied the bulk of my free game time. I am not going to miss fleets for my market for instance and as such my own activities limit me to a certain extent.

Now, I am back to take Bosena in my steely grip. The people who were living in Bosena while we were gone had settled in nicely. They were doing a fine, quick business. However, rumor is that they moved out the weekend we were returning home because they didn't want to share a station with my boys who base out of Bosena.

After running a split market I saw a true need for even more market orders. I think the biggest pit of running this thing is the sheer number of market orders. It seems that every time I turn around I am rolling near my upper limits. Unlike station trading I need to hold a greater volume of things. Ship fitting is not an straight forward science. Some modules are simple and others, like Damage Controls involve each meta type needing to be available.

I took my third TCS market alt and plugged in Tycoon. I then went through my hangars and started to relist everything bit by bit including the various odds and ends. Now that I will be running two markets, regularly, I had to drop all of the lazyness and fully convert TCS onto the shoulders of my alts. The good news is that I did discover a way to vicariously watch my market at work through Aura. It involves having all three alts plugged into Aura but I can watch the things that sell even if I cannot see who buys them.

However, mixed with my time in Solitude (we deployed to Syndicate but based in Solitude) I am completely comfortable in saying if one makes a sold, well fleshed market, people will come to it. A few weeks of patience are needed. I have now started two markets where there were not any with nearly identical results.

In Bosena, several other groups moved into the area once we deployed. I tracked their basic buying habits and kept them supplied in what they needed which was different from what the boys need. As the supplies were on the market so did they shift more buying power to their home system. At the same time people started to list some basic things. Jump Fuel is rather heavily stocked. I also had to deal with some relisters over the weekend but I may have stomped their enthusiasm into the ground already.

There is always the worry, as I share what I do, that Bosena is only functional because my boys live there and support me. They do support me and they support me consciously. When they buy things from people that are not me they report it to me. I remind them that they are buying the item in the price range that I've drawn the line at as, "good". But, while we were gone, another group moved in and discovered that our bed was very, very comfortable.

The mirror to this was Solitude. In Solitude I waged a quiet, market focused war against relisters. I beat them down through tenacity. Someone(s) has that entire market on lock down with the prices for many basic commodities sky high. My push into Solitude made a dent, if a small one, in that market. At the same time, by the third week in I was selling more things to people who were not in my corporation then I was to people who were. There was a high sec system next door that was reasonably stocked. The out of corp market purchases were so large that I went from my original plan of around a hundred market orders to about two hundred with three billion on the market. I wound up trading off stocking days with Bosena to keep both of them going due to demand.

The very presence of a market will bring people in. Our location in Solitude was not the best place to stick a market in my opinion. It was okay due to the entry point structure of the area, but not great. Yet, people will travel to save ISK. They will travel to reasonable places. In a market as abused as Solitudes, they will most definitely travel. The relisters and those who control the market do nothing but abuse the potential clientele. If they joined my market religion I'd preach that treating that captive audience better would generate more ISK over the same period. But people are often greedy vicious beings with a short or no view of the future. The lack of attention to Bosena shows in the regional charts with many items having upward slopes that abruptly dip down the weekend I started to restock.

It may just be my bad market habits and poor economic decisions that cause me endless confusion about this. I know that the market will bear its burden. However, people can just leave and buy elsewhere. The constant push of prices to go up confuses me. Picking up the occasional sale at an obscene price does not seem worth the effort when one could sell everything at a more reasonable level, quicker. I've noticed that many of the relisters in Molden Heath swing through, buy a stack, relist, and vanish from the market.

For all the discussions that I have with people who come to me to ask my opinion, what I notice the most is that it takes a while to develop the further forward look. Once you list something you want it to sell. It may take a few days. The small hub run by one person is not like Jita or any other frantic hub. But once that trickle starts it turns into a steady stream and the ISK will start to accumulate.

Comments

  1. Do you make a point of selling hulls as well, as in a reasonable variety of them?

    I think you virtually need to make it a one-stop-shop to really make it work and create a successful market where there was none before.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I sell hulls in Bosena. I did not sell hulls in Syndicate.

      In Bosena I sell T1 hulls under battleships. A few pirate ships. A few faction frigates. I stock T2 frigates. In general T2 ships are to specialize these days to just have that ISK hanging when the store hasn't earned it yet.

      I try to have it that someone can dock and refit into a good ship with a solid fit with no stress.

      Delete
  2. Until I can fly a cloaky hauler, Bosena will have to continue to mock me from a jump out. I prefer not to pay black frog ridiculous isk for deliveries and not increase my margins above reasonable. I meant to play "Don't Relist the Cynos for redonkulous high" a few weeks ago and realized what BF charges would eradicate my desire to help by making me charge beyond what I find acceptable.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. 7.5% (on 1B delivery) or 2.3% (on 5B) is hardly ridiculous.

      Or if you're so dead set on setting your time and effort at a negative value or zero, use one of the rebalanced industrials with a cloak and MWD.

      Delete

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