EVE New Citizens Q&A

in order of local population

jita
amarr
dodixi
hek
rens

you can sell to the buy orders but will likley make a loss doing so

if you want better isk then yeah.

if you want immediate isk then sell to a buy order

The market in Eve is a huge part of the game. Learning it and how to do well within it are valuable skills to have in this game. There are resources out there for finding out more but I just briefly want to speak to your specific questions here:

So when you sell to buy orders you get isk immediately. With sell orders the sell always goes to the lowest order regardless of who the buyer tries to buy from. For example if there were only 2 of item A on the market and one was selling for 100 isk and the other for 200 isk and you purchased the one for 200 isk you would still see the 200 isk order on the market and see a transaction in your wallet for 200 isk. The player selling item A for 100 isk would have been paid 200 isk.

So the way that works out in trade hubs is that players will often sit there and babysit their market orders and keep moving their sell price down 1 isk below the lowest price and often you will put up sell orders only to have them under bid almost immediately. Now if you learn the market trends you can make good isk on sell orders without babysitting them. Items with lower volumes are less likely to have this happen as are lower volume trade hubs.

I make good margins on sell orders but for select stuff and sometimes my orders will be up for months before the stuff sells. I typically sell most of my loot items to buy orders or reprocess the low value ones. The only sell orders I put up are for stuff that I got into strictly for the market profits. For loot I typically don't look for best sell price. I just try to move the stuff so that I can spend more time doing what I do to make isk.

At some point you will need to decide if your time is better spent exploring or sitting in a trade hub all day to trying and make 7% more on an item that you are trying to sell.

Time vs. isk vs. resources.

If you have 10 trade orders then you'll not want to tie up an order waiting for a 100k isk profit. So the smart thing would be to sell to a buy order and only make about a 10k profit. If you have 200 orders then you can post the sell order and walk away.

If you're an explorer, it's usually best to have a "base" to drop off loot. Once you have enough loot, setup a courier contract and ship em to Jita. Have an alt in Jita to transfer the loot to, and either setup sell orders, or if you can't wait, sell to buy orders.

If you're using sell orders, you only need to update your orders once a week. Eventually they will sell.

I kind of hinted at this before but for me; I buy stuff that I need and sell stuff that I want to liquidate. If I want to make isk on the market I'll pick an item or group of items and working on selling that or those item(s) in quantity.

Another way to say it is that I look at it from an isk / hour standpoint. So if I were to sit in station and babysit a bunch of small orders of loot that I got just to make an extra 10 or 20 million my time would likely be better spent just doing what I do best as I could easily make more isk than that in the same time frame doing something else.

However this is just a game and at the end of the day you need to do what's fun for you. Use the following equation to do the math breakdown on which direction to go:
Fun / Hour > ( ISK / Hour ) X 2

Personally, I just sell immediately in order to fill out the buy orders in null sec. I get ISK in my wallet immediately where it's safe and it helps out my allies by giving them much needed parts at a low rate. Sure, it's probably a lot less but I still have a positive cash flow and can make more runs in a night. One good data and relic site will pay for my ship and fittings.