Guild Wars 2

I’ve read a number of times that you can make a profit crafting, but I still don’t see where it is. If you go to gw2spidy.com and look, sure there are tons of items you can craft that have a healthy profit. It’ll even tell you which components are cheaper to buy on the trading post, but of the 10 different items I’ve poked at, every single time I list, boom, within a couple minutes, someone else is listing lower. Add to this that I generally set my prices such that it literally cuts the potential profit in half, and I just do not understand how things get spread out as they are in the first place.

For example, the Beryl Mithril Amulet of the Valkyrie.
Yesterday, and for a good week or so, the profit margin on crafting and selling was close to 30silver. So I made some and listed them at a price that cut 10silver out of it. I got out-bid in less than 5 minutes. So I let those sit, and made another one, and listed with even more profit loss, and again, outbid within 5 minutes. So now they are stacked up, with a sell price at less than half the profit that the items have been at for a good week.
The same applies to other areas I’ve ventured into.
How do these profit margins get so extreme when someone is sitting there with stacks of a thousand just waiting to outbid anyone that drops an item in for sale?

Neural.1824:

I’ve read a number of times that you can make a profit crafting, but I still don’t see where it is. If you go to gw2spidy.com and look, sure there are tons of items you can craft that have a healthy profit. It’ll even tell you which components are cheaper to buy on the trading post, but of the 10 different items I’ve poked at, every single time I list, boom, within a couple minutes, someone else is listing lower. Add to this that I generally set my prices such that it literally cuts the potential profit in half, and I just do not understand how things get spread out as they are in the first place.

For example, the Beryl Mithril Amulet of the Valkyrie.
Yesterday, and for a good week or so, the profit margin on crafting and selling was close to 30silver. So I made some and listed them at a price that cut 10silver out of it. I got out-bid in less than 5 minutes. So I let those sit, and made another one, and listed with even more profit loss, and again, outbid within 5 minutes. So now they are stacked up, with a sell price at less than half the profit that the items have been at for a good week.
The same applies to other areas I’ve ventured into.
How do these profit margins get so extreme when someone is sitting there with stacks of a thousand just waiting to outbid anyone that drops an item in for sale?

Crafting is basically nothing else than complicated flipping. Buy ingredients low on buy order and undercut by a copper. Knowing your recipes by heart is a huge advantage. I wouldnt suggest to use spidy to look for profitable items as everybody does that. If you use common sense and look for items that have a fast turnover, you will make more profit. As you mentioned, it can take days to sell an item that nobody wants. If I wanted a valkyrie rare amulet, i would rather pay a little less for the amulet of the dead, which has pvt stats but an exotic beryl jewel on it instead of the embellished one on the one you crafted.

Look for something that gives just 5s profit but will sell 10 times faster and you will make more gold. The relative low buy listing of your amulet (35s) is an indicator that there is not much demand for it.

Also make sure that the item you are crafting is not listed in one of the crafting guides over at gw2crafts.net, otherwise you have strong competition in selling.

Also, the real profit comes from checking how low the buy orders are on your ingredients, as spidy takes sell listings as its base to tell you, if its cheaper to buy or craft. For example, you need a component that is listed with 16s on the tp but the buy order is only 10s. To make the component, you need 3 items that are all listed at 5s and 4 on buy order.

Spidy will now tell you to buy the 3 ingredients for 5s each because its cheaper than the 16s for the component. If you are serious about making gold, you put in buy orders for the ingredients anyways and are happy because you paid 12s instead of 15 or 16s. But if you would have put in a buy order for the component itself, you would have saved an additional 2s.

You get undercut because people do exactly what you did – go to one of the sites, look for the highest profit item and then make it without considering the market. Ask yourself – “why would someone buy this?”/“why would someone not buy this?” A few people obviously buy them, but why would someone spend over 1g on a non-BiS amulet when an exotic isn’t that much more? Or ascended for laurels/badges? Big spreads usually mean a slow moving market, otherwise people would rush in and collapse the spread.

If you want to actually make money you need to figure out what people actually buy and/or why they buy things. You also need to figure out the best way to source your materials, this is not always just “click buy” or place a buy order.

thehipone.6812:

You get undercut because people do exactly what you did – go to one of the sites, look for the highest profit item and then make it without considering the market. Ask yourself – “why would someone buy this?”/“why would someone not buy this?” A few people obviously buy them, but why would someone spend over 1g on a non-BiS amulet when an exotic isn’t that much more? Or ascended for laurels/badges? Big spreads usually mean a slow moving market, otherwise people would rush in and collapse the spread.

If you want to actually make money you need to figure out what people actually buy and/or why they buy things. You also need to figure out the best way to source your materials, this is not always just “click buy” or place a buy order.

If I want to check the market for an item i want t ocraft that has a big spread between buy order and sell listing (with the crafting value inbetween), i usually put in a buy order myself and check how fast it gets filled. If i get it relatively fast, i relist it and check how fast it sell/gets undercut.

The TP is multi-server, and there are thousands upon thousands of users online at any given moment. If even two people are looking at Spidy at the same time and say “hey, I can make a profit selling Gold-Plated Hairbrushes” then they will compete with each other for sales and suddenly there are dozens more for sale than people want to buy and the profit disappears.

Multiply that by a hundred players a day all selling the same thing, and any item that stands out as an easy money maker becomes oversupplied quickly and the potential for profit disappears.

That’s the tricky part of playing the TP, and why it’s harder to make money at it than people think. The more people involved in a particular segment of the market, the less money each person makes, until there are so many people competing with each other that no one makes any money. Success on the TP involves figuring out what will sell before everyone else does.

Wanze.8410:

Neural.1824:

I’ve read a number of times that you can make a profit crafting, but I still don’t see where it is. If you go to gw2spidy.com and look, sure there are tons of items you can craft that have a healthy profit. It’ll even tell you which components are cheaper to buy on the trading post, but of the 10 different items I’ve poked at, every single time I list, boom, within a couple minutes, someone else is listing lower. Add to this that I generally set my prices such that it literally cuts the potential profit in half, and I just do not understand how things get spread out as they are in the first place.

For example, the Beryl Mithril Amulet of the Valkyrie.
Yesterday, and for a good week or so, the profit margin on crafting and selling was close to 30silver. So I made some and listed them at a price that cut 10silver out of it. I got out-bid in less than 5 minutes. So I let those sit, and made another one, and listed with even more profit loss, and again, outbid within 5 minutes. So now they are stacked up, with a sell price at less than half the profit that the items have been at for a good week.
The same applies to other areas I’ve ventured into.
How do these profit margins get so extreme when someone is sitting there with stacks of a thousand just waiting to outbid anyone that drops an item in for sale?

Crafting is basically nothing else than complicated flipping. Buy ingredients low on buy order and undercut by a copper. Knowing your recipes by heart is a huge advantage. I wouldnt suggest to use spidy to look for profitable items as everybody does that. If you use common sense and look for items that have a fast turnover, you will make more profit. As you mentioned, it can take days to sell an item that nobody wants. If I wanted a valkyrie rare amulet, i would rather pay a little less for the amulet of the dead, which has pvt stats but an exotic beryl jewel on it instead of the embellished one on the one you crafted.

Look for something that gives just 5s profit but will sell 10 times faster and you will make more gold. The relative low buy listing of your amulet (35s) is an indicator that there is not much demand for it.

Also make sure that the item you are crafting is not listed in one of the crafting guides over at gw2crafts.net, otherwise you have strong competition in selling.

Also, the real profit comes from checking how low the buy orders are on your ingredients, as spidy takes sell listings as its base to tell you, if its cheaper to buy or craft. For example, you need a component that is listed with 16s on the tp but the buy order is only 10s. To make the component, you need 3 items that are all listed at 5s and 4 on buy order.

Spidy will now tell you to buy the 3 ingredients for 5s each because its cheaper than the 16s for the component. If you are serious about making gold, you put in buy orders for the ingredients anyways and are happy because you paid 12s instead of 15 or 16s. But if you would have put in a buy order for the component itself, you would have saved an additional 2s.

Interesting. I didn’t know about gw2crafts.net, though I should have been smart enough to assume something like that existed.

Odd about the speed of how things move. I thought the high sell price was an indication of movement, as that’s how it has appeared to work when flipping, but then I’ve been flipping things that people buy in large quantities, so when someone comes through and buys 100 of an item it clears out sell orders quite a lot, resulting in a high price.

edit: one of the few things I miss about Eve. Their market data was comprehensive.

for things that sell slowly, I like to make 10, then list them one at a time. When someone undercuts me, I just list another one. basically, I’m ready for 10 undercuts. Once I run out, I will remove the first one I listed and undercut the current undercutter. In the end, all 10 would only be relisted once instead of 10 times. Plus it’s fun to get to say ‘ha! you thought you could undercut me!?!? take THAT’

High margin, low volume commodities are almost like territory; they only have a high margin because they are neglected and no one cares about them, so someone moves in to do low volume spread trading. If anyone else tries to get into that market they’ll be chased off quickly by the trader who is happy to drive his margin to zero if it gets rid of any competition; his profit relies on there being no competition in the market.

It’s a weird dynamic that I can’t claim to understand well, but that’s the short version; only get involved in those markets if you’re willing to fight a turf war.