EVE New Citizens Q&A

It is not possible. No one is going to be listing a sell order at less than a buy order price. In addition to being a dumb thing to do, if you set up a buy order in a station, it will automatically buy out any sell orders under the requested buy price.

Firstly, you seem to be thinking about buying from sell orders and subsequently selling to buy orders. This is far from the only way to trade and is, in fact, one of the least efficient ways of doing it. However, such opportunities exist - just not in the same station. You will never be able to buy a module in station X and then right click -> sell and turn a profit. However, if a module is selling for 100K in station X and you go ahead and haul it to Station Y five jumps away, you might be able to.

While the market shows you the whole region, each individual station is its own market. Within a single region you can have sell orders that are lower than buy orders, as long as the buy order and the sell order are not in the same station. Side note: Buy orders can have a "range". If a buy order is set to "five jumps", then the buy order is effective for every station within five jumps of the station it was placed in. When you see a buy order highlighted in green, it means that the station you are in is currently within the range.

There are certainly many other ways of acquiring stuff. When you can, you want to be setting up your own buy orders to acquire stock, and setting up sell orders to sell them. "Station trading" is probably the most obvious form of trading. You'll notice a slew of buy orders set up in trade hubs. This consists of people trying to get cheap stock so they can immediately relist the modules on the market in the same trade hub for a higher price (the sell order price).

Other than explaining the market mechanics, no one can teach you how to trade because it's a fluid process. You're looking for ways that you can acquire things at a lower price than what you can sell them at. There are tons of ways to do this and it varies based on region and time.

Two potential ways;

1. The buy and sell orders are not on the same station and the buy order is not "green" (in range of) the sell order when market is viewed from the station where the sell order is. In theory this could be an opportunity to make is ISK - buy the cheap sell order, haul it to the station where the buy order is, sell. Do check how bulky the stuff is first - some deals are good only because it would take a freighter to haul any significant quantities - say, raw ice, 1000m3 per block - you may see sell order that beats buy order somewhere else but if you can only fit 10-15 blocks to a hauler, the profit may be insignificant enough that it isn't worth the time.

Also always verify that both stations are places where you want to fly to - if one of the orders is in low sec station, the trading trip may end in "kaboom", "wreck" and "loss of ISK".

2. The buy order has "minimum quantity" that is greater than "1" and you have spotted one of the margin trading scams. The idea of the scam here is as follows;

- There is a "great deal" buy order up that requires a number of units to be sold at once (say, 1000 units) and the order price is very high.
- There are a bunch of higher-than-normal-market-value but well-below-that-high-buy-order sell orders around but all are smaller than 1000 units, so they do not sell to the buy order. They appear to be lowest in the region but if you'd compare to another region (or Jita) they would be considerably higher.
- The buy order was set using the skill "margin trading", ensuring that most of the ISK to cover it isn't in escrow and with a character that has an empty wallet that can't cover the rest of the order when someone tries to fill the order by selling.

When someone tries to sell to that order, it instantly fails due to no ISK to cover in wallet ("poof, it's gone, no sale"). The scammer gets a profit if you bought from those overpriced-yet-below-the-buy-order sell orders and you have a bunch of stuff that you paid more than their fair market value for. Margin Trading skill is bit wonky and can be abused in this way.

Hence, always ignore any buy orders that ask for more than "1" unit to be sold to the order (with the possible exception of buy orders for base minerals - Tritanium, Pyerite etc. that always have brisk trade at fair prices no matter where you go, negating this scam as it requires an item that doesn't get traded too much). Also consider trading in something else as margin trade scams almost always happen with items that have very little trade volume (hence, being poor items to trade legitimately)