[Trading] How Do You Use Guild Sales History?

Sharlikran · June 3

I have been thinking about guild management tools and wanted to get feedback from guild masters, officers, traders, and regular guild members.

One idea is the possibility of built-in member performance metrics that could be exposed directly through the game.

Examples might include:

* Weekly sales totals.
* Weekly tax contributions.
* Guild activity summaries.
* At-a-glance indicators showing whether guild-defined requirements are being met.
* Roster participation information.
* Other guild management metrics.

For guild masters and officers:

* What information would help you manage your guild more effectively?
* What information do you currently track manually or through addons?
* What information would you like to see available directly through the game?
* Do you review only summary metrics, or do you regularly examine individual member sales records?
* How important is access to the underlying sales history compared to summary statistics?
* Do you use guild-wide sales history when evaluating trader performance, recruiting members, or assessing guild health?
* If you had clear indicators showing whether members were meeting sales requirements, would that be enough?
* Would you still want access to the underlying sales history?
* How often do you review actual sales records versus summary metrics?
* What information helps you make guild-management decisions?

For guild members:

* What information about your own sales, contributions, or participation do you regularly look at?
* What information do you currently rely on addons to provide?

I also have a broader question about guild sales history itself.

How important is guild sales history to you?

Some players are primarily interested in recent pricing and only care about the last week or two of sales.

Other players intentionally maintain months or years of sales data and use it for long-term market analysis, historical pricing, trader research, seasonal trends, and personal sales tracking. Some players effectively maintain a "Library of Congress" of sales data because they value the historical record itself.

Where do you fall on that spectrum?

* How much sales history do you consider useful?
* How far back do you typically look?
* Do you primarily care about current prices, historical trends, personal sales records, guild performance, or something else?
* What role does sales history play in your trading decisions?
* Do you primarily look at your own sales history, other members' sales history, or both?
* How important is access to guild-wide sales information?
* Do you use sales history to evaluate market activity within a guild?

To help put that into perspective, consider a purely hypothetical scenario.

Suppose all of the information you had available came directly from the game's built-in interfaces and only a limited amount of sales history was available. This is not a suggestion that anything is changing. I am simply interested in understanding how important sales history is to different types of players.

* Would one or two weeks of history be enough?
* Would a month be enough?
* Would you want access to longer periods of history?
* Would shorter history windows affect your pricing decisions?
* Would they affect your confidence in market values?
* Would they affect your ability to research trends?
* Would they affect your ability to track your own sales over time?
* Would they affect how you price items for sale?
* Would they affect your confidence when buying items from traders?
* Would they affect your ability to identify market opportunities?

For players who primarily use current pricing information, would a shorter history window make any difference?

For players who maintain large databases containing hundreds of thousands or even millions of sales records, what value does that historical record provide to you?

Another area I would be interested in hearing about is how players use sales history beyond their own personal sales.

For example:

* Do you primarily look at your own sales history, or do you regularly review guild-wide sales history as well?
* Do you look at what other members are selling?
* Do you use guild sales history to help determine pricing?
* Do you use guild sales history to understand market trends?
* Do you use guild sales history to identify items that are selling particularly well or particularly poorly?
* Do you use guild sales history when deciding what to list for sale?
* Do you use guild sales history when deciding what to buy?
* Do you use sales history to understand how other traders price items?
* Do you use sales history to identify opportunities to buy, sell, or compete in a particular market?

I would also be interested in understanding how players interact with multiple guilds.

For example:

* Do you compare sales activity between different trading guilds?
* Has guild sales history ever influenced your decision to join a guild?
* Has guild sales history ever influenced your decision to leave a guild?
* Do you use sales history to evaluate the health or activity level of a trading guild?
* Do you maintain sales history from guilds after you leave them?
* Have you ever intentionally collected sales history from multiple guilds for pricing, market research, or historical analysis?
* If you do not do these things yourself, do you know players who do?

Likewise, for regular guild members:

* How important is your own sales history?
* How important is access to guild-wide sales history?
* Do you regularly review what other guild members are selling?
* Do you use sales history to help determine pricing?
* Do you use sales history to compare activity between trading guilds?
* Do you use sales history to evaluate whether a guild is a good fit for your trading goals?
* Do you use sales history when deciding whether to remain in or leave a guild?
* Do you use sales history primarily for pricing, tracking income, market research, meeting guild requirements, or something else?
* Would your experience change if detailed historical sales records were not available?

The goal here is simply to understand how players actually use sales history today and what information they consider most valuable, whether that information comes from the game itself or from addons.

I am interested in hearing from everyone, whether you prefer a week of data, a month of data, or enough data to build your own personal Library of Congress of sales history.

Necrotech_Master · June 3

for my personal opinion/use

for history statistics of my own sales, i like to look at the totals i earned per guild in the last week
for current sales i like tracking the current sales week (what items sold, in which guild)

i like my data that pulls the guild history to go back at least 30-60 days, 30 days i feel is a pretty good mark, as some markets can change rapidly in that time frame and its nice to see how its trending and if theres any outliers on the graph to know if theres the avg is being thrown higher than it should (an example of market trend would be the night market recipe fragments, those in the past 30 days have dropped drastically lol)

it does make things difficult tracking when some items im trying to sell like motifs are sold at such low volumes across the 3 guilds im in i sometimes dont have any data for quite a long time (theres some motifs ive had which had 0 sales for months until we get closer to an even which drops more motifs), so this is why its nice to have some longer term data to at least get an estimate of what i should start a listing at (though anything older than about 90 days might not really reflect what current markets would be at if its an volatile listing price)

Sharlikran · June 3

One additional aspect I forgot to ask about is historical graphing and trend analysis.

MM and ATT currently provide historical price graphs, scatter plots, and trend-analysis tools based on detailed sales history.

For players who use those features:

* How important are historical graphs to you?
* Do you use them to determine whether a market is rising, falling, stable, or volatile?
* Do they affect your confidence in pricing?
* Do they affect your buying or selling decisions?
* Do they help identify opportunities that would not be obvious from a single average price?

Likewise, if detailed sales history was unavailable, those graphs and trend-analysis tools would no longer be able to provide that information.

* How would you react if historical graphing in addons such as Master Merchant and Arkadius' Trade Tools was no longer possible?
* Would a current price alone be sufficient for your needs?
* Or do you consider historical graphs and trend analysis an important part of understanding the market?

For players who maintain very large sales databases, does the value come primarily from the sales records themselves, or from the tools built on top of those records such as historical graphs, scatter plots, trend analysis, and long-term market research?

I'm interested in hearing from both casual traders and players who actively use those tools.

Soarora · June 3

If I may, you are asking a LOT of questions and the formatting does not make it easy to answer them individually. Along with there being no numbering system or headers, the whole questionnaire comes across as overwhelming. I think you would be better served making an external form (such as with google forms) to reduce the amount of questions people see at once (and hide irrelevant questions), assist in formatting, and importantly, allow the possibility of answer types other than written. Alternatively, a shorter questionnaire with bolded headers that’s easy to copy-and-paste or use the quote button on would make it easier to answer as a forum post.

As for your actual questions, all I can say at the moment is that I don’t often use personal sales data. I have trouble using libhistorie because it keeps getting stuck. I got so frustrated with it getting stuck after the major libhistorie update that I turned it off on most characters and turned off most of the tracking. I only really have it for mm, and I only really have mm to work with awesome guild store. I primarily use ttc. I have used ttc graph data before, but it’s rare, to see how the economy has changed over the years, especially for dungeon masks (which I have trouble on knowing when to sell).

Sharlikran · June 3

From your response, it sounds like you primarily use MM to work with Awesome Guild Store and rely on TTC for most of your pricing information. You also mentioned that you do not use personal sales data very often and have disabled most history tracking, although you do occasionally use graph data to see how prices have changed over time.

One thing I am curious about: if LibHistoire was more responsive and you were not running into the issues you described, would that change how much you use history-based features, or would you still primarily rely on TTC for pricing and trading decisions?

Also, if you primarily use TTC for pricing and still find the Deal Calculator useful, TTC Companion can provide TTC pricing data to the Deal Calculator. The Deal Calculator can use pricing from MM or TTC Companion, but not both at the same time. It is one source or the other.

Sharlikran · June 3

Part of the reason there are so many questions is that different players use trading tools in very different ways. Some players only care about current pricing, some care about their own sales history, some manage trading guilds, and others use long-term market data and graphs.

I am not expecting every person to answer every question. The goal is to identify which features people actually use, which features they do not use, and what information they consider valuable. If a feature is not important to you, that is useful feedback too.

I also intentionally kept the discussion on the forums because I wanted the responses to be public. That allows people to read other responses, agree or disagree, and contribute additional information based on what others have already said.

I am not familiar with creating Google Forms or similar surveys, and I am also not very familiar with the formatting capabilities of the ESO forums. The forums seem fairly limited beyond things like bold, italics, lists, quotes, and links, so I worked with what was available.

Sharlikran · June 3

The Deal Calculator can use pricing from MM or TTC Companion, but not both at the same time. It is one source or the other.

Correction to what I said about TTC Companion:

MM and TTC Companion are separate addons. MM has its own Deal Calculator feature, and TTC Companion has its own Deal Calculator feature.

The two addons are not intended to be used at the same time.

If you are using MM, you do not need TTC Companion just to use TTC pricing with the Deal Calculator. MM already has settings that allow the MM Deal Calculator to use different pricing sources, including TTC pricing.

TTC Companion is mainly for players who want a TTC-based Deal Calculator without using MM.

Sharlikran · June 5

Hello, I’m [redacted], GM of [redacted], a PCNA trading guild. I do not currently have an ESO forum account, so I’m replying here instead. Hopefully my input helps.

For guild masters and officers, this is something we deal with constantly. We track a lot of information, and for us the underlying data matters just as much as the summary.

Currently, we use the addon Snapshot to export and track things like sales, bank transactions, roster changes, and miscellaneous records such as blacklist additions. Snapshot already does a lot of this very well, and tools like it are a major reason high-end trade guilds are able to function at the level they do.

Beyond that, we also track bids, stall history, raffles, guild promotions, trader performance, and multi-year income and expenses. We have data going back to 2020, along with custom spreadsheets, scripts, addons, and Discord bots to help sort, track, and filter that information.

Built-in indicators for weekly sales, tax contributions, roster activity, and guild-defined requirements could be useful, especially as quick at-a-glance tools. That said, I’m not sure what entirely new trackers we would need unless they offered something beyond what addons already provide.

Summary metrics are helpful, but they would not be enough on their own. A simple “met requirement” or “did not meet requirement” indicator is useful for quick checks, but we still need access to the actual sales history and raw data.

The reason is context. There is a big difference between someone who barely missed one week, someone who is consistently inactive, someone who sells heavily but inconsistently, and someone who contributes in other ways. The underlying data helps us make fair decisions instead of purely automated ones.

Guild-wide sales history is also important for evaluating trader performance, recruiting, and assessing guild health. For example, comparing sales against bid costs can help show whether a stall is worth the price. It also helps determine where dues or requirements need to be set, how events or seasonal changes impact sales, and how the guild is trending over time.

For trading guilds, sales history is not just pricing data. It is operational data. It helps us understand member activity, guild health, market behavior, trader value, and long-term trends.

So for me, built-in summaries would be great, but they should not replace detailed guild sales history. The summary tells you what happened. The history helps explain why.

Thanks for everything you do!

Sharlikran · June 5

The above post was shared with me privately by someone who does not have an ESO forum account. I am posting it here so their feedback can be part of the discussion.