Guild Wars 2

Hi All,
I recently decided to go for a legendary and as such, need the money for a precursor (Don’t worry I am not whining about precursor prices) and I know some of my guildies have made loads from basic flipping but every time I try and flip something, I make a loss. Please could someone just help explain the system of buying low and reselling higher to me? Would be much appreciated (P.S I bought carrots )

~Squishy

He said, “teach me to be a Power Trader, while I stand on one foot,”

… [his mentor said], “buy low, and sell high — that is the whole of Power Trading; everything else is just commentary.”

Flipping is not as easy as some would have you believe. It requires getting a feel for the market as a whole and finding a niche that offers consistent profits or to frequently vary what you flip. It also requires having good instincts, i.e. knowing when to hold-em and when to fold-em. Some people are born able to flip, but most people will need to (and be able to) learn it.

I recommending starting with a relatively safe product that allows you to experiment. Try items that have a WTB (aka “want to buy” aka “highest custom buy offer”) that’s around half of the WTS (aka “want to sell” aka “lowest custom sell offer”). This gives you a lot of room to play with. You also want items will be likely to sell at both those prices throughout the day. For some reason, fine dyes almost always work to experiment with flipping.

Example: try orangespring dye (ok, don’t try it, since other folks will be reading this post, but you get the idea). As I type, the WTB = 0.63s and the WTS = 1.32s, just about 2x the WTB. Put in a buy offer for maybe 25 units at 81 copper; should fulfill quickly. When you get them, resell at 1.19s. You’ll net around 20 copper profit/unit.

Now that you have the idea, experiment with other dyes to see how much over the WTB you have to offer to accumulate product quickly and how much lower you need to sell at to avoid competition while you have inventory. Get a feel for how quickly the market ebbs and flows. Try it with masterwork or mid-priced rares to see that the profit goes up a lot per unit, but the “velocity” of the market is a lot slower.

Now that you’ve practiced in a “safe market,” try to look for a niche that suits your needs in terms of risk vs reward, profit vs investment, etc. You’ll find a lot of commodities (i.e. easily-farmed items) will follow daily and weekly patterns: low-ball offers might fulfill 1-2x/week and high-ball sell prices might take another week to be purchased, but the net profit will be better.

You can’t make “quick money” from ecto, but it’s a great market to watch to see how much it changes throughout the week, during the day, and even within a few minutes. Going rate might look like ~38-41s, but there’s a decent chance you can pick some up for 37 or even less.

Alternatively, you can find high-cost items that rarely trade, but have a huge profit margin. Since those sell so slowly, the odds are better that competition will show up before you buy or sell. But if you work enough items, your per-unit profits will be excellent.

Also remember to factor in both taxes.

one bit of advice: if you see something that gives a lot of profit, you won’t make any profit off it (such as buy for 1g, sell for 10g). first, you won’t be able to buy it because you’ll have to refresh your buy order every 3 minutes. then, if you magically are able to buy it, you won’t be able to sell it because you’ll be undercut every 3 minutes and have to relist. you’ll end up selling it near the price you paid for it anyways. things like this happen because of flukes. someone might of bought 100 of them instead of 10, or they tried to manipulate it, or w/e. it’s a temporary price fluctuation and it’ll go back to normal VERY quickly.
that’s where the ‘know the market’ comes into play – knowing which items actually are worth that. easy thing would be to check gw2spidy for every item you are considering buying. also, gw2tp.com has a search function that you can easily find items with a good spread.
good luck!

If you start at 0 gold I would suggest starting with regular farm runs (not gonna tell you which one here since that would ruin the run, just use google) until you have ~100g. After that start flipping since you can buy larger amounts of items which makes flipping worth the time. Sadly there’s no easy/best way for flipping, otherwise every player would do it. Just try it and get a feel for it. Then keep on flipping until you have your legendary.

That’s how I’ve done it multiple times now. Sadly I spend all my gold on the Mystic Forge rather than skins or a legendary. Currently at ~4k gold spend and I only got 1 precursor so far (surprisingly right after release and I only spend like 2g on rares).^^

Anyway, the best advice I can give is don’t give up. It takes a long time to get all the gold. Also don’t start gambling.

One thing I suggest is to create a spreadsheet (Google docs is perfect for this). This will let you keep track of the items you are selling, what you bought them out, what you want to sell them at, how much you spent or will spend, how much you plan to make, how much you will spend on the 5% listing fee, etc. I also have mine calculate my profit margin so I can see how well I am doing. I normally don’t go for anything under 15% profit but I have been known to go under 5% if I can make a few gold off it.

All we can say is “buy low, sell high”.

As previously stated, it is not that easy, but part of flipping items on the market involves not leaking your profitable items.