Guild Wars 2

I’ve never flipped items before, but my friend told me that it can be very profitable. I did some research, and I’m trying to flip some items, but it seems almsot impossible to buy items low. I’m getting like 2 items a minute.

Am I just doing it wrong, or is it actually impossible?

Aurum.8793:

I’ve never flipped items before, but my friend told me that it can be very profitable. I did some research, and I’m trying to flip some items, but it seems almsot impossible to buy items low. I’m getting like 2 items a minute.

Am I just doing it wrong, or is it actually impossible?

I have been active in other threads in this Subforum concerning Tyria’s economy. If you take the time to read them, up to you, my position/answer would be clear. I posted a plea for Arenanet to close the gem store and it was redacted because it was not conducisive to the thread. Arenanet please close the gem market. That’s it for me here.

I think you could do it quite easily if you played the market on a weekly cycle. Prices for crafting materials tend to shift enough that flipping could be worthwhile between the weekend and middle of the week.

Be sure though that you account for the posting fee when you’re doing it though, of course.

EDIT: Given recent events though, this weekend may be a bit different than usual.

Assuming you know how to pick what to buy, it can be very profitable.

Keep in mind the items traded in very high volumes like crafting components are far more likely to have a steady price with little to no profit. Although that’s not to say you can’t profit from them, especially with the prices in flux after the bot bans.

With enough cash you could. I did a Degree in International Finance, I was pretty surprised to see the graph in the Trader when I logged in, I’ll say that.

I think it was due to a bug, but last week, Dye drops went through the roof, price accordingly dropped to 2s, yesterday the price was as high as 4s. If you had the gold and enough units were low, you could have doubled any input, not really a big risk either.

There are things you can profit by flipping, but the difficulty is that they’re not always the same things and it can take a lot of work for new traders to find out which things are profitable. I’ve done well at times flipping middle-tier fine crafting materials, because they move reliably enough to be fairly low-risk, without moving so quickly as to almost never have any margin (the way common materials usually do).

Psientist.6437:

I posted a plea for Arenanet to close the gem store and it was redacted because it was not conducisive to the thread. Arenanet please close the gem market.

It should honestly be redacted here, too, because I can’t see what on Earth it has to do with the topic of this thread, which is about flipping items on the trading post. What do gems have to do with that?

It takes patience. Put in low buy orders, play the game or do something else. Check in later, cancel any unfilled buy orders and relist whatever you got.

Seriously. I can’t stress this enough. It takes patience. It’s one of those “a watched pot never boils” sort of things.

Thanks for all the tips guys. I’m just glad to know it’s possible!

Very much so. Advice: just watch to see what is sold when and for what.Use small sample sizes first. Also use a calculator http://tpcalc.com/ is the one I use.
Makes sure to remember to keep in mind there are listing fees and a tax.

It’s harder to do it in this game, since the TP is game-wide. So you’d need a lot of capital to play.

monepipi.5160:

It’s harder to do it in this game, since the TP is game-wide. So you’d need a lot of capital to play.

Not quite true. The other tip is “diversify.” You can’t control a niche of the market as well as you could on a server-based economy, but if you spread out your investments, even with a small amount of capital, you’ll mitigate your risk and steadily gain gold over time.

What you earn is somewhat proportional to what you put in, so it’s true that a lot of capital helps. But it’s not a necessary barrier to overcome. I started flipping when I had about 1 gold to my name. If I invested more, I’d probably have more than the 20G I have now.

I’m not a high roller, of course, but I’m proof it works in the long-run even without much to start with.

You can flip but it is a kitten annoying way to make money. Play the game, you’ll find money comes naturally eventually.

Narkosys.5173:

Very much so. Advice: just watch to see what is sold when and for what.Use small sample sizes first. Also use a calculator http://tpcalc.com/ is the one I use.
Makes sure to remember to keep in mind there are listing fees and a tax.

tpcalc.com is good, but it doesn’t show me how efficiently I’m using my gold. Spending 100g for a profit of 5s is obviously worse than spending 10s for a profit of 5s as it allows me to buy a bigger stack or have more gold left over for other items.

I threw together a quick spreadsheet to give me a little more info. For example, tpcalc will tell you that 13s to 30s is 12.5s profit and give you the breakeven prices. But my spreadsheet will also tell me that buying @ 13s and getting back 25.5s (85% of 30s) means I’m getting a 196.15% return on investment (or if you prefer, 96.15% profit). Therefore I know how efficiently I’m investing my money.

Here’s the simple math required to flip items:

Look at the sell price you intend to sell at. Multiply by 0.85.
This number is the price you can buy at to break even, you obviously want to buy items at a much lower number than this.

The answer to your question is “no”. There is nothing on the trading post that has the A: margin to be flipped AND B: volume to be traded reliably.

All trading in GW2 is fundamental, which is the same thing as spending 70 minutes at Jorrmag hoping to find Dusk. (crapshoot roll of the dice).

morbidillusion.2759:

Here’s the simple math required to flip items:

Look at the sell price you intend to sell at. Multiply by 0.85.
This number is the price you can buy at to break even, you obviously want to buy items at a much lower number than this.

The answer to your question is “no”. There is nothing on the trading post that has the A: margin to be flipped AND B: volume to be traded reliably.

All trading in GW2 is fundamental, which is the same thing as spending 70 minutes at Jorrmag hoping to find Dusk. (crapshoot roll of the dice).

ROFL, and wow — is this actually sarcasm or irony in search of an “emoticon?” Is this perhaps a clever ploy to say “no, these aren’t the droids…er, profit you are looking for — move along?”

There ARE plenty of items that can be flipped for a profit — and items that are flipped every single day. There are other items that (at least a few of us have noticed) tend to have prices that fluctuate during the course of the week. (I like to buy low mid-week and sell for a profit on the weekend.)

There are also a lot of items that get flipped “day trader” style where people see a large margin on Widgets, buy a couple hundred for the “bid low and wait price, plus one” and then try to quickly dump them by undercutting the lowest seller. Hilarity ensues when five or six people try to do that at the same time, and the margin between “bid low and wait” and “Buy It Now” shrinks until someone’s actually selling their Widgets at a loss. Then, everybody walks away from that “market niche” and eventually “market equilibrium” sets in and the margin becomes large enough for the cycle to repeat itself, over and over. Meanwhile, the “day traders” run off en masse to find (and accidentally collapse) other niches, ad infinitum.

As someone said in another thread, if you can’t find something to flip, you’re probably looking in the wrong place. There ARE high-volume, low profit niches out there that can easily net somone a gold (or more) per day with minimal work, or there are low-volume, high profit items that everybody and their brother try to undercut each other on.

Lastly, just because the margin on Widgets right now isn’t worth the time, investment, or hassle — that doesn’t mean that the margin won’t be worth it in six hours, or tomorrow, or in three days.

Wait — why AM I telling everybody this and cutting into my own profits!? (Besides the fact that the market itself [and flipping] preys on human emotions like greed and instant gratification — and until those go away, there will always be plenty of profit to go around!)

“These aren’t the droids you’re looking for!”

Edit: just saw this part further up-thread:

Doman.3042:

What you earn is somewhat proportional to what you put in, so it’s true that a lot of capital helps. But it’s not a necessary barrier to overcome. I started flipping when I had about 1 gold to my name. If I invested more, I’d probably have more than the 20G I have now.

I started flipping when I had all the new equipment I needed on my character and one gold piece in the bank myself — which then became 2 gold, then 4 gold, and so on! Having more capital means it’s easier to invest in more niches, which means I’m not spending much of my profits yet, but I’m getting to the point where I can start buying “stuff.”

In short yes.

The safest way to play the “trading post game” is to find items that are being offered for twice the price being asked. You place a bid slightly higher for one or two and walk away for a while, i usually wait 12 hrs. When you come back pick up the item and post it for sale or if you we’re unlucky take down your bid. Simple rinse and repeat. Obviously the more gold you have the more items you can bid on and the more effective this becomes.

In the beginning I would scour the TP looking page by page for these items, now though there do be a tool available for finding the items a bit faster:
http://www.gw2spidy.com/

morbidillusion.2759:

Here’s the simple math required to flip items:

Look at the sell price you intend to sell at. Multiply by 0.85.
This number is the price you can buy at to break even, you obviously want to buy items at a much lower number than this.

The answer to your question is “no”. There is nothing on the trading post that has the A: margin to be flipped AND B: volume to be traded reliably.

All trading in GW2 is fundamental, which is the same thing as spending 70 minutes at Jorrmag hoping to find Dusk. (crapshoot roll of the dice).

Take a look at this link: http://www.gw2spidy.com/type/0?sort_margin=desc

It’s gw2spidy.com’s trading post armour data sorted by “margin”, which is the difference between buy & sell price.

By clicking on an item you can see the historic buy / sell listing prices & volumes to see if it’s likely to be profitable to flip.

Obviously not all are, there are many items on the TP with stupid prices. And on items with bids below the vendor price you need to check the tooltip to work out the minimum buy price you can list to see if it’s profitable.

But overall the various websites which track this data prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that there are plenty of items which you can make a profit by flipping.

Personally I don’t use gw2spidy.com, I use another site. But this one lets you sort by profit (margin) so it’s easiest to make my point with it.