With relativley small investments you can easily double your money in short periods of time. Easily purchasing items from vendors and reselling them to players.

 

For this guide I am going to use the example of buying and selling empty bottles.

To get started you want to figure out which towns have the lowest taxes. When one of the factions takes control of a city, they can set the taxes in that city. The taxes can vary from =300% to -30%. The lower the taxes, the more profit you stand to make. Once you determine which towns have the lowest taxes, you can head to the shops and start buying them out.

As you start purchasing items from the vendor, be sure to buy all of the available items. In this example, you want to buy all the bottles that the vendor has. If there are any left on the vendor, they won't restock. Everytime the vendor sells out of an item, it will restock twice as many on it's next restock, up to 999. Vendors restock their supply every 1.5 hours.

Now this might not sound like much of a profit, but if there are multiple towns with low taxes, you can easily bring in 10-20k items every hour and half. Once you have a nice stock pile of items you can start selling them.

When you start selling items you have a few options. One of the best ways to establish yourself as a supplier is to setup a vendor in a good location. As long as you keep your prices consistant, fair, and keep your vendor stocked, people will come back, and spread the word about your vendor. It's also a good idea to keep your supply vendor limted to just certain supplies. If you are selling other items like rares and misc stuff, set up a seperate vendor.

For some items, you can use commodity deeds to sell your items easily via a vendor. Other items can't be deeded, so you might have just put small stacks of the item on the vendor. If you have a good vendor location that is bank accessible this won't be a problem for most people.

The other option is the least desireable and that is item dropping. If you are an established player and have a loyal customer base, people may trust you enough to give you the check and have you drop the items on the ground for them. Obviously this is very open to being ripped off, but sometimes there is just no way around it when it comes to bulk items.

If you don't have a vendor you can still do trades relativley safely. Certain spots at banks can be utilized as a "safe" trade area. For example, Serpants bank has a table that is cut off. If you teleport behind this table it keeps you one tile away from any thief and they cannot steal from you. Also the table inside vesper bank keeps you in a seperate room and you can trade across the table. These aren't guaranteed safe, but they are safer than a standard trade.

So, now that you know the techniques for being a good merchant, let's crunch some numbers.

These numbers are based on current market prices at the time this article was writen (Oct 2009)


Bottle prices in -30% towns = 4gp each
Current market value for bottles = 7gp each
Your profit for each bottle is 3gp.

A good vendor location will cost you about 10k a week, but a good location is key to being successful.

Each vendor can sell up to 999 bottles. 999 bottles costs 3996 and will sell for 6993. That's just around 3k profit for every bottle vendor every hour and half. Most towns have 4-6 bottle vendors so if all 8 of the faction towns are at -30 you can be collecting about 40k bottles every 1.5hours. That's 120k profit every restock.

Yeah it might take awhile to sell all those bottles, but you would be surprised how easy it is once you build up a customer base.

These techniques work for just about any commodity that players buy in builk.

Hope it helps!