Just a few months ago, I was kicking and screaming about being forced to join trade guilds just to sell. Well, you get what you get, and you make the best of it. I looked around the boards, and eventually found out how to join good trade guilds with trading posts. First one I got into was the Elder Scrolls Exchange, which is a great organization with three guilds, one in each faction. I eventually got a few more invites from keeping my eyes open in zone chat for recruiters. I've dropped a couple lower selling guilds for guilds with more activity, and now I am at a point in the game that has become very addictive. This back story is only to explain how you can get started if you are not yet in the ESO market. Everyone will have their own connections, and preferences on how active they want to be in trading. The purpose of this thread is to inform you on how you can make a decent profit from these traders while also helping to stabilize prices for all products. This thread is not for elite, but for the average player like myself.

Now let's picture a product. I will use a recipe as an example. New players want to learn recipes so they can craft food. How will they get these recipes? Well, they could find them in the world as we all do, but you soon learn by looking through the trade posts that there are hundreds of recipes to learn. So a customer is looking through a merchants inventory and looking for what to buy, and they see a recipe for 227g. Let's call it "Enriched Fishy Sticks". What makes this customer believe this price is fair? Well, comparing it to other merchants listings of course. The customer will want to buy the cheapest, so if in another kiosk, they can get "Enriched Fishy Sticks" for 89g, then they will buy that instead. As long as there is a supply, the merchants can keep undercutting the price until all the supply is gone, and then they can raise the price again.

This is where I, and others like myself come in to make a profit. Using a few add ons, you can get a pretty accurate idea for what items are selling for. First add on which is a must have is Deome's DataDaedra. This add on scans all the recent sales in each of your guilds, and gives the average prices for what items sold for. This is a medium between the highest and lowest, and a pretty good indicator of how valuable an item is. Remember that, the hotter your guild is, the higher their prices will be, but they will also have a larger sales history for more accurate prices.

Once you have the prices, it's time to shop. For every few players that know how much to sell an item for, there will always be that one who has no idea what they are doing. They do not visit the forums, and they do not use add ons. They just play their game and collect things, and eventually join a random guild to trade with but don't know what price the item should sell for. Some will sell for too much, and some for too little. That's where we capitalize. Using the prices from datadaedra, we can go around to different trade kiosks and look for cheap items which should be selling for much more. Another add on I use for this purpose, and also for selling my items, is AwesomeGuildStore, which allows you to easily sort the kiosk searches and even bookmark your favorites. Now remember, as a merchant, you are not looking for things you need, but for things that will sell. Every player in the game might be in need of something to improve their character, so if there is a provisioning stack, or a recipe, or maybe some materials for crafting armor, all of these items will be desired by someone.

By playing the market, you soon learn what people want. And I'm telling you right now, they want provisioning, alchemy, enchanting, recipes, and motifs. This is obvious information, but you need to remember this when scanning other kiosks, because using the numbers given by datadaedra in the tool tip, you will spot obvious profit just waiting to be claimed. I'm talking about a stack of 100 selling for 50g, which players have payed over 1,000 for. They are there if you take the time to look. Another example is a recipe that is selling for 27g, but is valued at over 100g. Since sales space is limited, I like to look for at least a 300% profit selling item, but also keep in mind if players even want to buy it. You will be suprised, and for every one item that fails to sell, there will be a few that make you a lot. No risk, no reward, but datadaedra also shows the number of these items that were sold, and these numbers only go back a month. So if many of them have been sold, you will know that the product is desired.

I like to organize each of my guilds by importance, and post the most expensive stacks in the best selling, but I also only post certain materials in the lower selling guilds so I can organize my inventory more easily. For duplicate items, I always cancel the listed item to combine the stack and then post it again to save space. Even though you will pay the listing fee, the profit will be much greater. The last add on I like to use is so I can get a good idea of where and what I have sold. Shopkeeper 1.0 (Classic) is a great tool that shows you a list of your sold items with the guild it was sold in. It also has a useful tool to show how many of those sales were from the kiosk, and how much you make a day average. You may see many prices are higher than the average from dattadaedra. This is because merchants can ask for whatever they want, but that does not mean it will sell. And while they are stuck with a store of overpriced merchandise, you can charge the average price and make profits based on selling many items.

Now back to the recipe. Like I was saying, the customer will look for the cheapest prices they can, so if they see "Enriched Fishy Sticks" selling for 89g, they will buy that, and you will be left with your product and no sale, which will eventually drive the price lower. However, if someone like myself goes around and plays the market, buying all the under priced items and selling them at average, I will be eliminating the supply of cheap goods and keeping the price up. The more players there are that do this, the more prices will stabilize. It is a very fun mini game to get into, and I hope this thread helps others to find a new appreciation for playing the market as I have. Recently, I have reached V1 with my main and have started an alt to play the other factions with. My main is now a full time merchant, so when I'm questing with one character, I'm buying and selling with the other. It's pretty fun and I recommend giving it a try.