Guild Wars 2

For any of the crafting disciplines the crafter might wish to know what’s hot on the trading post to make decisions about what to craft and what not to. Unfortunately the trading post lacks this data.

I can see a single page of most popular items (when I come into TP) but I would like to be able to click on a item and see a small chart showing the number sold, price point over a given time period (perhaps a week). This data would be useful to buyer and to seller. As a cook for example, it’s very difficult to figure out what (if any) items are actually selling on TP.

If you want to figure out what foods are selling, there’s several indicators to go by. Perhaps the easiest one is price – the foods that aren’t stuck at a couple of copper are ones people actually buy. This is useful because the search feature allows you to sort foods by price in descending order (Category:Consumable; Subcategory:Generic; Rarity:Fine).

Another important factor is the buy/sell gap. The smaller the gap is between the highest buy order and the lowest sell order, the more popular that item is. For example, Omnomberry Bars currently have buy orders at 2.15s and sell orders at 2.33s, which demonstrates the fact that they are by far the most popular consumable.

Usefulness is also a decent indicator of popularity; that’s why Omnomberry Bars are so popular. For example, Rare Veggie Pizza is quite strong with the +40% condition duration, and so I would expect it to sell reasonably well.

Thanks for the tips

You can monitor buy and sell order listings data over time. You can check the TP regularly for items of interest or check an external source such as I’ve seen linked before on the forums. With that you can get an idea of what things are probably selling for. After all if an item sells then it will be selling for the lowest range of sell offers and highest range of buy offers at the time you are viewing the item. One has to use judgement to determine the level of supply vs demand to know if it is a good idea to try and list for higher or lower than the current buy and sell orders. How many of one item that is listed for one price has a factor in that. For example if an item is a slow mover it might have a large number listed at one price. This is obvious in the trash items nobody or almost nobody buys at vender+1c with 10s of 1000s or 100s of 1000s at that price. Fast moving items you can actually watch the number of listings and possibly price points change as you refresh the detail page for the item. Keep in mind to that buy and sell orders isn’t a guarantee that items are selling for those prices either. It wouldn’t be common but some items might not move at either price waiting for buyers or sellers to budge towards the others price to the point at which the item changes hands.

look at blt jus a click away u can see tyhe orders for each item.. that will show u the demand for it

Yes the buy orders show a demand but a demand for lower price points and doesn’t reflect the demand for higher price points. There is no way to see the actual filled demand’s prices. However the top buy price and bottom sell price are good indicators of that for high volume traded items. But like I said before, it is possible that buy and sell orders sit not being filled if sellers and buyers don’t agree on a price. In other words nobody sells to the buy orders and nobody buys the sell orders. In this case the top buy order and bottom sell order indicate nothing. Also some items buy orders will simply be there hoping people are too stupid to check what the item is probably worth and hope they happen to get lucky. For example 1,000 buy orders for 1c on an item with vender value of 20c. Crazy thing is even if you could sell a 20c item to someone else for 1c why bother, just give it to them for free. In essence those listings probably aren’t a real demand for the item.