ESO does not have a central auction house. Some like it, some hate it. Fact is, ESO’s traders remain a bit different from the other MMOs and it creates “a game within the game,” if you will.

How to choose the trading guilds?

Let's look at the main selling locations, as they are a key factor for choosing the guild and a for some of the money making strategies (ie. Flipping).

Top spots for guild traders are in: Belkarth, and Mournhold;

Very good: Rawl'Kha and the alliance capitals like the Wayrest, Elden Root, and also other big cities like Ebonheart;

Very Good, but included in a Chapter/DLC: Alinor and Vivec City (Alinor is currently strong, as everybody is there enjoying the new chapter, but that can change);

Good: All other main cities with multiple guild traders clustered in one spot. You can usually find one of these cities per zone;

Poor: Isolated merchants in outskirts;

The worst : the traders in Outlaw Refugees.

With the top guild traders, you will sell much faster and at a slightly higher rate, but requirements to remain in those guilds are of course also higher. Requirements are normally either in terms of minimum sales (eg. 10k to 100k of sales per week), or weekly fees (a few thousands per week); or a mix of both. I am a strong advocate for the minimum sale strategy but it’s up to you. It may be less stressful with a minimum donation amount for some.

Selling Strategies:

If you have guilds in different categories, remember to price items accordingly. Lower tier traders should be priced lower. If you price low enough you can get a quick and almost guaranteed sale thanks to “flippers.” How low you should price your items (when comparing to MM and TTC price suggestions) depends on the rate at which you are capable of replacing the sold items, and maintaining full 30 slots in the store.

I advice to maintain a mix of quick-to-sell items (eg: crafting materials sold at a reasonable price), and some longer term shots (that Telvanni furniture recipe at 2 mil. might need a few days to find a buyer.)

Remember to look not only at the average price of the item, but also at the curve / trending of the price, (has the price either been raising or dropping) and the number of sales.

Regularly check your listings and relist items that have not sold after several days (and might have become overpriced because of a drop in the item’s market value.) Note: every time you cancel a listing you will technically lose money 1% of the item’s value. The same is true when the item has been listed for full 30 days on the trader and it doesn’t sell (at which point the item is returned to you.)

It’s not a big loss, but still something to consider while minding the possibility of overpricing items. For this reason I suggest trying of selling the most expensive items in the zone chats (writing WTS and linking the item in the zone chat.)

I could go on and on about other aspects (such as keeping items in reserve that were received during a “festival” or other special game event, and then reselling them after a few months, or about taking advantage of the new DLCs and their brand new loot tables, etc.), but for now I’m not making the guide too long. If you still want to start looking into these additional bits you will still find some chances in doing so from some bits I have included further on.

Many of our guild members are in some very good trading guilds as well, so you can also ask others for more advice!

Our own guild trader in Tamriel Homes is special too: we’re mainly focusing to a niche market: furniture related wares. This is explained on a separate topic, but if you’re a Tamriel Homes member for example, it is a good idea to have as many of the 30 store slots filled with furniture items as possible (piece of furniture, recipes, materials.)

As I was mentioning in the basics, Flipping has some prerequisites and it takes some time to learn. At the beginning I would not invest more than 100k on it and I would buy only items for which you have a lot of MM data for from the past few days. If you believe you will have the time, resources, and motivation, then here you go:

Which traders should I check?

The most efficient trips are to traders I previously classified as “Good” (Marbruk, Shornhelm, Wrothgar, etc.): a good number of traders per loading screen and a decent volume of goods sold per trader, without the traders being located in the top spots with their wares priced high. However, hidden gems can be found everywhere. A check in some isolated traders can sometimes give you some very good bargains!

How to utilize addons with this?

The best way is to use your Craft Store in combination with Awesome Guild Store. Access a trader and order the search by “most recent”; set minimum price (depending on your wallet, can be <300, <1000, etc.), and set the AWS specifications on item quality from White (or Green if you are in hurry) to Gold quality. Look through the results for items that were put in sale very recently. (They have still 30 days left.)

How do I calculate my margin and decide if it's worth it?

First, look at an item in a guild store and how many % MM tells the said item is being sold under its average market value. Remember to take into account a 7% tax cut that occurs when you sell the item through a guild trader (the previously mentioned 1% is only applicable if the items goes unsold.)

Thus, an item which MM tells you is being sold at 30% below its average value, will only net you 23%, assuming you resell it with the market average price.

Second thing you should consider is the actual price of the item. A 40% discount on average seems like a great deal, but if the average price of the item you are looking at is 100 gold, flipping it for its average price will only net you 60 gold in which case it isn’t really worth of one of your trade slots on the guild trader.

The third thing is a frequency at which the item is being sold at, and its price history curve. Some items (materials, top potions, etc.) tend to remain relatively stable on the price curve. Others have huge spikes in popularity (and a few players are able to influence the market and create “baits”... be careful) : an item set which a known youtuber is advising to use for example, new motifs that have just come out of the latest patch, etc. You can make high profits with those spikes, but like all speculation-like investments, they are risky.

The following video is a bit long and I do not fully agree with everything, but it can help you understand what I mean. Some things are easier when visualized! :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW2bMCGPAgc

I personally find grinding soul-crushing, but it can be some really good money...

Almost all of the following grinds are not (or not anymore) secrets. Meaning they might be packed and thus useless, especially during the prime hours (in late afternoon/evening and weekend). Because of this they may work better for those who’re playing at night/early morning and during working days.

Few examples of grinding locations:

Public Dungeons (and bosses): go for areas with popular zone item sets, (eg: Mother’s Sorrow & others in Deshaan) or humanoid enemies which drop gold when killed (eg: the always classic Vile Manor)

Crafting nodes: download Harvest Map addon and enjoy some running around (Craglorn for the extra chance to get Nirncrux, or Coldharbour for a chance of those shiny furniture flowers we like so much.)

Wardrobes & Urns: This is also something to note as a player housing lover: there are several famous spots full of urns and wardrobes, such as the Traitor's Vault in Artaeum (here’s the ESO forums post with a map: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/415092/summerset-furnishing-plan-farm-locations/p1), Direnni Acropolis in Summerset, and Dreloth Tomb in Vvardenfell. There are also a couple of good spots only available during specific quests (Crystal Tower towards the end of the Summerset main quest line.)

Grinding Telvar Stones / Keys in Imperial City is also liked by some. Killing zombies near the Aldmeri Dominion or Ebonheart Pact bases is a good mix of exp, Telvars, and Shards. If you don't get killed by other players that is...

How to grind:

If you need to grind enemies, you need some AoE and a damage item set, and you can go with a friend. If you are going to grind nodes or wardrobes, you go solo and you may want a mix of sets that increase your movement speed.

I won't go through the damage item set recommendations as there are tons of different builds out there. However, here is a list of sets you can mix up to increase your movement speed. ZOS introduced a cap on movement speed, but you still can attain nice results!

Cyrodil's Ward
Jailbreaker
Fiord’s legacy
Medium armor and Orcs also have speed passive. The Steed Mundus stone an additional help if you are not already at cap.

And do not forget to unlock the passive skills from Champion Point tree, such as Treasure Hunter, Master Gatherer, and Windrunning in the green tree.

Thieving is a classic of Elder Scrolls and already has its fair share of guides. I will simply point to those and provide a quick summary of important points here:

- Grind up to max level on Legendermain and Thieves Guild skills + the start of Dark Brotherhood for real profits.

- Follow the “pick pocket twice, then Blade of Woe kill” for best results. Focus on most difficult targets (Nobles, Mages, etc.)

- Don't bother with the white-quality loot.

- Combine sets that increase movement speed and reduce detection range: see “Grinding for speed sets + Night Terror, Night Mother, Night Silence (latter only if you are not a vampire already, which I might also suggest to look at.)

- Some classes (Nightblade) and races (sneaky Khajiits and Bosmer, money loving Imperials) are better than others at this.

- Harvest Map addoncan also be useful for thieving as it marks treasure chest locations down.

- For stealing there are many places that I like: in non-DLC zones Wayrest remains as my favorite, and Summerset (DLC) also has some good spots (Shimmerene.)

Below here you can find additional guides that are worth looking into:

A guide with a solid start, but which has unfortunately been abandoned a long time ago (but which still includes the basics, as well as map guides.) http://roguesfolio.tumblr.com/Guide (http://roguesfolio.tumblr.com/archive)

And some additional talks and guides on builds and item sets:

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/296431/a-thiefs-build-guide-one-tamriel

Kevduit video guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER7BqegMnA4

As mentioned above, do as many crafting writs as you can with your characters. Few tricks to make your 7 crafting writs per character in less than 5 min:

Use the addon: “Dulgubon’s Lazy Writs” for equipment crafting.
Craft many of the items requested for Alchemy & Provision in advance, as the same requests will always come up later again. When you have the items on you already, you will just have to accept and return the quest and collect the rewards.

Research equipment traits on your characters as it increases the chance of getting Master Writs from completing the daily writs (from max level crafting writs only.)

Knowing more full sets of purple crafting motifs also increase the chance of acquiring Master Writs. However, the increase seems minimal, and I’m uncertain whether there is a calculation/guide to how much it influences the chance of getting Master Writs. To play safe you could start with the cheapest motifs first (Ancient Elf, Primal, Daedric, etc.)

Follow the below guides to level up crafting fast:

Alchemy: http://www.sunshine-daydream.us/ESO/alchemy.html
Provisioning: add one skill point in Recipe Improvement every time you can and always craft the items from the highest level green recipe available.
Enchanting: deconstruct glyphs created by others, (by your own alts, is also a possibility) then just combine any unknown runes you have.

Here are some additional information and links that I referred to before:

Which dailies? Check this list and decide for yourself, depending on what you like! http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Repeatable_Quests

For friends of housing I would advise to start with dailies that are necessary for furniture you like (eg: Divine Magister achievement for the waterfall furniture in Summerset.)

PvP: Gold Vendor is active during the weekend. You can type !Golden in our Discord to see the items sold during a specific weekend. Be careful when buying nice jewellery that is normally only available in dungeons as they are BoP (Bind on Pickup.) Militant Ordinator motifs still sell well. The vendor is located in Vivec City, at the Battleground encampment.

IC: If you are there for grinding, do it on off-hours. Even then, remember that if you die, you will lose half of your Telvar stones and that it is a PvP zone. Staying close to your base reduces the risk, and with some luck, you can quietly farm there for some time for some good money.

If you are in a small group, you might even want to try to conquer all flags upstairs and then start killing Bosses in the various areas. Higher rewards, but higher risk too. Or you can gank/bomb the people doing the things mentioned above ☺ . Then go into your base and buy alchemy ingredients and Hakejo-runes. Sell the Fragments. Profit.

Fishing: Here’s a list to some guides and addons to help your fishing: now the fishing loot-table is not bad at all. Between fish to be filleted for Perfect Roes, the new fishing-exclusive motif (Pyandonean), and the usual useless crap you get in any grind.

Here is a couple of guides: https://elderscrollsonline.wiki.fextralife.com/Ultimate+Guide+to+fishing
https://alcasthq.com/fishing-guide-eso/

And useful addons: http://www.esoui.com/downloads/info918-VotansFisherman.html