The ramp up to voting is a very hard time. Sitting down to work on my market took more energy then it should have. However, I had some motivators. I had received a request from someone to pull some information about my market. That motivated me to get the delisted items relisted for a better overview of what I have. The second was a request for help about how I use my market tools.
That is what left me writing a loose, non technical guide to using Eve Mentat to keep stock of your market inventory. I need to clean it up and publish it I guess for those interested. Eve Mentat is a powerful tool but I use it almost exclusively to keep track of what items have sold. That is one huge thing missing from the current Eve market interface. Sold and expired orders. As it stands I can manually check what sold against what I have in my inventory. If I am technically proficient, I can write spreadsheets that pull and total information for me. We're in a stage of Eve's history where we are challenging barriers and definging what they actually are. Eve's market was meant to be a market as we find in so many games but it has grown beyond that.
That may be another topic when I'm a bit less distracted. We do have a some recent improvements that have made running a market easier. One of these is multi-sell. Introduced in Phoebe we have been using the interface and the changed sell window that came with it for a few months.
Multi-sell is interesting. I used ti very enthusiastically in December and learned an ugly lesson. Muscle memory can screw you over. I hit enter after typing in one of my numbers. Its a habit. My entire sale window sold itself. Due to Eve's markets there are buy orders of all types everywhere that convince the game that overly low offers are not overly low. I lost about 200 million in that mistake and learned to type slower and use multi-sell with more caution and not with valuable goods.
The place that I now use multi-sell is items that need to be restocked. I then use one of my screens and two clients to create something that looks like this:
Chance is my Jita alt. She lives there and she buys stuff. She has no market skills. All she does is buy things and write contracts to shipping companies to move those things.
Tesau is one of the three market alts that belongs to TCS and sits in Sujarento. She has market skills and nothing else. Because I use a corporate hangar for my alts to share, she can simply open that and start selling things.
Like many people I have a shared chatroom for my alts. Tesau lists the items to Chance. Chance checks prices. Tesau changes prices with the multi-sell window based on Jita prices. I do about 10 things at a time. And poof it all goes up. Window layering helps me move faster in these situations. Its a lot of clicking one way or another and sometimes I get tired of it. The windows are not exciting to look at but I've become fascinated with trends and buying habits and seeing the meta move through modules and ammo.
What I have discovered is that slow moving items start to lose their value a bit to me. I lower prices or whatever to get them to move. Ammo comes and goes with need and activity. Missiles are still my bane when it comes to having them and how slowly they sell. But I need to have them because people want them.
Stocking a market is only partially dictated by those around you. You have to learn about your customers but it also helps to understand what they may need. Long range T2 blaster ammo is an example of this. It sells when there are particular ops but it doesn't sell every day like faction antimatter. But I keep it available because a market like TCS doesn't run off of daily volume or item velocity. It runs off of over all volume over time.
I'd also like to remind people that the type of market that I run is a market run in dangerous space. It will be different from high sec. Here. market pressures are different. Your clients are more specialized. I carry a handful of T2 rigs in Sujarento for Snuffed Out. It's a personal investment that I make to try to help out a little bit. In general I've been successful with low volume and high variety.
That is what left me writing a loose, non technical guide to using Eve Mentat to keep stock of your market inventory. I need to clean it up and publish it I guess for those interested. Eve Mentat is a powerful tool but I use it almost exclusively to keep track of what items have sold. That is one huge thing missing from the current Eve market interface. Sold and expired orders. As it stands I can manually check what sold against what I have in my inventory. If I am technically proficient, I can write spreadsheets that pull and total information for me. We're in a stage of Eve's history where we are challenging barriers and definging what they actually are. Eve's market was meant to be a market as we find in so many games but it has grown beyond that.
That may be another topic when I'm a bit less distracted. We do have a some recent improvements that have made running a market easier. One of these is multi-sell. Introduced in Phoebe we have been using the interface and the changed sell window that came with it for a few months.
Multi-sell is interesting. I used ti very enthusiastically in December and learned an ugly lesson. Muscle memory can screw you over. I hit enter after typing in one of my numbers. Its a habit. My entire sale window sold itself. Due to Eve's markets there are buy orders of all types everywhere that convince the game that overly low offers are not overly low. I lost about 200 million in that mistake and learned to type slower and use multi-sell with more caution and not with valuable goods.
The place that I now use multi-sell is items that need to be restocked. I then use one of my screens and two clients to create something that looks like this:
It works for me. Your mileage may vary.
Chance is my Jita alt. She lives there and she buys stuff. She has no market skills. All she does is buy things and write contracts to shipping companies to move those things.
Tesau is one of the three market alts that belongs to TCS and sits in Sujarento. She has market skills and nothing else. Because I use a corporate hangar for my alts to share, she can simply open that and start selling things.
Like many people I have a shared chatroom for my alts. Tesau lists the items to Chance. Chance checks prices. Tesau changes prices with the multi-sell window based on Jita prices. I do about 10 things at a time. And poof it all goes up. Window layering helps me move faster in these situations. Its a lot of clicking one way or another and sometimes I get tired of it. The windows are not exciting to look at but I've become fascinated with trends and buying habits and seeing the meta move through modules and ammo.
What I have discovered is that slow moving items start to lose their value a bit to me. I lower prices or whatever to get them to move. Ammo comes and goes with need and activity. Missiles are still my bane when it comes to having them and how slowly they sell. But I need to have them because people want them.
Stocking a market is only partially dictated by those around you. You have to learn about your customers but it also helps to understand what they may need. Long range T2 blaster ammo is an example of this. It sells when there are particular ops but it doesn't sell every day like faction antimatter. But I keep it available because a market like TCS doesn't run off of daily volume or item velocity. It runs off of over all volume over time.
I'd also like to remind people that the type of market that I run is a market run in dangerous space. It will be different from high sec. Here. market pressures are different. Your clients are more specialized. I carry a handful of T2 rigs in Sujarento for Snuffed Out. It's a personal investment that I make to try to help out a little bit. In general I've been successful with low volume and high variety.
The biggest improvement to the multi-sell window would be if the sell price was adjusted to be 0.01 ISK (or 0.1 or even 1 ISK) below the lowest current sell price if the time is set to anything other than 'Immediately'. Currently the game punishes accidental carelessness in that window, which I believe CCP is trying to move away from.
ReplyDeleteOn that note, being able to change the price when 'Immediately' is selected doesn't make much sense either.