Is it ok to sell items for a profit?

jaws343

SidraWillowsky wrote: »

I feel like the only situation where you should maybe think twice about re-listing are cases where something is listed at a price that's so stupid low and it may have been an accident. I remember someone got drunk and listed 100 Hakeijo for something like 1000 gold total by accident. I think that if I saw that, I'd buy and send them a message to make sure they meant to do that.

That said, in the end it's the seller's responsibility to list something accurately...

If I took that route I'd be messaging people who list Blackwood, Blackreah, Reach, and Skyrim treasure maps for like 500 gold all the time. I buy at whatever price is listed and am happy for the great deal. I know I have accidentally listed things at the wrong price, and it was on me and the buyer got a great deal, oh well.

Gambino108

You're pretty much asking ''is it allowed for people to set their own prices for selling items?'' The answer is yes.

kargen27

MovesLikeJaguar wrote: »

zaria wrote: »

MovesLikeJaguar wrote: »

Buying low, selling high is the basis of merching. It's been that way in MMO's since the late 90s when they became a thing, and has been a practice for merchants IRL for thousands of years. It's not a bannable offense, though I'm not a big fan of scalpers.

Scalping is something different, is they you buy up an item who is in limited supply like concert tickets and selling back for an higher price. This don't really work in ESO but you can buy items you assume will be in demand like tempering materials tend to rise in price after an new chapter because new sets a lot like real life traders do.

Now new motifs tend to be very expensive and price tend to fall off.
Some exceptions like the Dro-m'Athra style has risen a lot in price since fewer do Maw of Lorkhaj than then before we got all the new trials.

Scalping happens in ESO too. When someone with enough funds buys up all listed items of a set then posts them for a higher price, that in itself is scalping/market manipulation. It usually happens with set pieces that don't get sold often, or with high-cost pieces like gold jewelry where there isn't a high volume of listings anyway, but it does happen and it's not great.

THere are over two hundred locations they would have to try and monitor to buy up all listed items. What you are describing doesn't happen in this game. A group of people tried it one time with limited success. Rare items are priced high because they are rare. It isn't really worth the risk to try and control those items because the players that are putting those items up for sale the first time usually know the approximate worth. It is the mid level items that really make gold when it comes to flipping.

Where market manipulation does happen is right after new content drops. Players will go to the PTS and see what common or mid tier items are going to shoot up in demand and they will buy as much as they can on the live server. When the content hits live everybody scrambles to buy those items so the prices increase. That is when the people planning ahead dump their stock back into the market. They get maybe two days of good profit before things begin to balance back out. Even that isn't true manipulation by players as the prices were going to increase anyway as demand increased. That is just players seeing there will be a demand and planning for it.
That strategy has bitten people a few times though. One in particular players with crafting bags ended up having large stockpiles of the item that was targeted as one to be in more demand. It was in more demand but the people wanting to take advantage greatly underestimated the true supply.

Alarde

This is not unethical, people adressing this as such haven't reflected the concept very well.

That's free market. Free is a way that anyone can sell at any value they see fit. The beauty of it is demand. If you decide to buy someone else's whole stock of Kutas for a price 25% under the market, so be it. Selling low is a lever a trader pushes when he wants to get gold fast. When you sell/resell those Kutas at a high price, what you're telling the market is "look, that's above the average price, i realize that, but i'm aiming for a higher profit versus time".

Part of the reason people buy your "overpriced" stuff is (commonly) because they can't find it available elsewhere for less or just don't want to search a lot for it and don't mind paying the difference. You probably won't be able to sell the stock of cheap Kutas you bought for a lot above average price, i guarantee you. Simply because resources are offered at every guild trader and people want to sell them before 2025.

Please don't call it morally questionable or anything like that. It's literally trading, the reason we are not still tribes.

moo_2021

Alarde wrote: »

Part of the reason people buy your "overpriced" stuff is (commonly) because they can't find it available elsewhere for less or just don't want to search a lot for it and don't mind paying the difference. You probably won't be able to sell the stock of cheap Kutas you bought for a lot above average price, i guarantee you. Simply because resources are offered at every guild trader and people want to sell them before 2025.

Please don't call it morally questionable or anything like that. It's literally trading, the reason we are not still tribes.

Do they? There are tons of over priced items getting re listed over and over again. The sellers probably don't even care about fees as they have too much idle gold in banks.

The only reason we buy overpriced is because they're bought low and re listed at high price. It's pathetic some people's only goal in ESO is to make life harder for everyone else

Techwolf_Lupindo

Thank you all for the answers. According to ZOS actions, this is not allowed as posted here, https://www.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/comments/px8q48/a_letter_to_zos/ and other places. So I am still wondering....

VaranisArano

Techwolf_Lupindo wrote: »

Thank you all for the answers. According to ZOS actions, this is not allowed as posted here, https://www.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/comments/px8q48/a_letter_to_zos/ and other places. So I am still wondering....

Er, no. That has nothing to do with reselling in-game items on guild stores for a profit. That post was talking about Gold duplication, and in any case, ZOS found that they themselves were in error. See the update from Gina Bruno here:

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/588031/update-on-recent-action-against-some-eso-accounts

Specifically, ZOS believes an addon tripped their anti-cheat detection, but upon further investigation
found that the Trading gameplay on all accounts was normal. The bans were all reversed.

There really is no cause for confusion here. The bans and reversal had nothing to do with selling ingame items for a profit. Players are allowed to price their ingame items for whatever they like.

(Now, you may be subject to your Guild rules - my guild took a dim view of people hilariously overcharging because it gave us a bad reputation. And your guild officers will exercise sensible suspicion - if you are selling one potato for two million gold, that looks an awful lot like goldselling in exchange for real money or laundering gold. You can do it, but your guildmates might give you funny looks for pricing beyond reasonable amounts.)

JKorr

robwolf666 wrote: »

Techwolf_Lupindo wrote: »

Can doing that get you banned?

It should imo. It makes it impossible for new players to trade at a reasonable price.
Also makes me wonder where these people find the time to collect the resources - if they actually play the game, how do they also have the time to collect it? On their computer/console 24/7? or *cough*farmingbotsprobably*cough*

I mainly do pve, exploring and questing. I can't tell you how many times I've watched players run past columbine, cornflower, all the material nodes actually, and ignore them completely. I usually don't; taking that extra 4 seconds on my way on a quest to pick up a few hundred gold each flower is worth, or ore I refine for tempers isn't really that much effort. I don't do high volume trading, and definitely don't farm unless its to help out one of my guilds. Simply being willing to stop and pick up mats and very casual trading in a no-dues, no sale requirement guild has added 11 million gold to my bank. Sometimes I wonder what I could accumulate if I actually spent time farming mats. Brand new players in cold harbor jammies can pick flowers; no dues social guilds get traders, no dues trading guilds get traders, brand new players can trade if they care to. Picking up columbine, cornflower, and bugloss can bring in a nice bit of gold to spend on whatever they need.

markulrich1966

you can even do it without moral issues. A base concept of trading in ESO is asynchronous trade.

E.g. during the elsweyr event, the stores were flooded with Anequina motifs, for 5000, even 2000 gold. These sold for 10k+ before. So you could buy 20 for 2k each, and sell them for 10k 9 months later.
Same with gear like briarheart purple rings etc.

Another issue is, that material prices double during events. I sell lots of furniture, so buy mundane between events for 300 each. I try to have a stock of 5000-10000 of them. Like this can offer furniture at affordable prices like 10k during events, I could not do it if I would buy mundane runes for 600 each at events. This is not exactly what you asked about, but it is related: buying when low, selling when high. It even has a morally positive effect: people still can buy furniture during events, even if no other people sell them as they are busy farming tickets/drops.

Bear in mind, that "flipping" also has a risk, the risk that you can't sell your stuff. People can be very strict when it comes to overpriced items, and there might happen things you did not expect, like another event dropping the motifs you bought before.

So flipping requires quite some experience, and long term knowledge if you want to do it successfully.

Another "positive" effect:
many people just buy from traders in popular places like Mournhold. So if you travel to places where people are too lazy to go, you can support even those traders by buying their stuff cheap, and selling it for higher prices in Mournhold. So your flipping becomes a service.

Amottica

Techwolf_Lupindo wrote: »

Thank you all for the answers. According to ZOS actions, this is not allowed as posted here, https://www.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/comments/px8q48/a_letter_to_zos/ and other places. So I am still wondering....

The topic or reason for that action is not relevant to what is being asked in this thread. Buying an item and selling it for a higher price is very different than using a hack to duplicate gold.

Regardless, Zenimax has reviewed what was happening the affected players and realized an add-on was triggering the system and there was no gold dupping occurring. That thread is linked below.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/588031/update-on-recent-action-against-some-eso-accounts/p1

Ooops. I see varanis said the same.

Vhozek

Yes. People seem to think "profit" is a scary word.
Come up with a price that pays off your labor on top of the value of the item according to demand.
Imagine if people risked their lives in real life just to end up with the same resources they had when they were being lazy. You might as well just stay lazy.

Lady_Galadhiel

You can resell at whatever price you wish,at the end of the day the buyer decides to buy it at your price or not.
The other day I was looking at a specific motif and only 3 of them on the market for 30k-50k each.I did visit all traders just to find out they where all sold out.The next day I look at TTC again just to see the same nickname selling 3 of the same page for 300k each.
I decided not to buy it,not because I dont have the coin,but because first of all I can wait till it appeas cheaper then 10 times as much as it regulary was and second because I saw it was the same person who bought them all,so nah,wont get my gold.
2 days later I got the motif for 60k so I was happy.

divnyi

Would be very weird for the game to enforce anti-capitalistic agenda. Buying cheap and selling as high as it can be bought in a reasonable time is essential part of normal and natural human relations.

For example, I sometimes make much cheaper prices because I have lots of items to sell and I want fast turnover. No anti-dumping laws in the game either

Rezdayn

Techwolf_Lupindo wrote: »

I like to go to some out of the way traders and buy stuff at a low price and then re-list it at a popular trader for a bit a profit of gold.

Can doing that get you banned?

No.
Thread over.
No more need to argue about if merchanting in a video game is bad...

Sylvermynx

SilverBride wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

...if they accidentally left a zero or two off and posted it for a much lower price than intended, which happens, then that is not the problem of the person who buys it by any means.

I did this very thing today... didn't notice until it sold for 1k instead of 10k. I wish I could say it's the only time this has happened, but sometimes I'm in too big a hurry and not paying attention. My fault, not the player who got a good deal because of my mistake.

I picked up a couple of Leyawiin furnishing plans from guild stores today - one for 412g, one for 500g, when the rest of those plans were selling on every seller for 4k to 5k (yeah, I spent the afternoon running around all the capitals today....) If those sellers message me that they left off a zero, I'll send them the rest. If they don't.... well, I guess I get lucky once in a while....