Market Discussions

It's a subject that I'm getting to grips with but there aren't easy answers. I'll just give you some tips that I've picked up along the way and hopefully a few more people will weigh in with some more specific advice.

1 - Join the ingame channel Blueprints. You can just type that name in the channel listing or go to the folders, Trade, Blueprints, click Join. Lurk around in that channel and see what people are buying and selling at.

2 - Use contract search. It is a powerful feature. You can change the drop down to just BPO or BPC or all. You can also filter on categories when you have either BPO or BPC selected. Compare prices. Check what the NPC price is for a 0/0 packaged blueprint.

3 - Look at the contract history of sellers from 1 and 2 above. You will see what people are actually buying and selling at as opposed to what they are asking in Jita local and in the Blueprints chat channel.

There are some well know blueprint traders that you will get to know from the above, I won't name drop here :) But once you have identified them, their contract history is a mine of information.

To look at a persons contract history, Show Info on them, then at the top left the three bars, click that and then Show Contracts.

There was at one time a website that tracked contract prices but it was mainly focused on deadspace and officer stuff in contracts. This was a few years ago before they were added to the market. There has never been a contract API afaik so the prices must have been added manually. Unfortunately that site went defunct a while ago and there aren't any out of game resources except e.g. fuzzworks that tracks NPC prices.

Trying to come up with a formula to estimate the value of research on BPOs is a bit tricky as there are so many variables but if you focus on specific researched blueprint originals that sell well e.g. the T2 components that are used to build T2 ships and modules you will see that they have a fairly narrow range of sell prices for 10/20 BPOs.

Maybe a dump question, how exactly do I access the contract history of somebody? I really didn't figure that out ...

I'm a small-scale BPC producer (few billion ISK per month). The majority are sold directly to repeat customers, and never appear on public contracts. I sell above cost, but below most contract prices.

Some slow to copy BPC with low supply are sold at public contract price. Customers can buy one or two from the market and wait for more to be made available, or buy tens even hundreds of those same BPC from me.

Contracts are a good way to get a feeling for the market, but in general the prices are inflated.

BPO are especially inflated, but every once in a while you will find someone dumping all their BPO, and can scoop-up some real deals.