Market Discussions

no, i can't

they have had many wars in the last years, and none of them showed any significant results. the last one vs marmite had exactly 0 kills.

traderoute wardecs only help against people who can't handle them.

FTFY.

Exactly.

And if you want to disrupt the business of an experienced lowsec pvp corp, you probably do them a favor by paying someone to pvp with them.

The only thing you could do is pay code or someone similar to gank their neutral freighters in uedama. And they don't even have to use uedama (or niarja) if they buy in amarr (which is also closer to their operations)

Better start working on those gdocs/excel skills.

Have done something similar in the past and it's 20 times less work with a proper sheet telling you exactly what the situation is.

Imo evernus is ok for looking at the overall picture & history.

For day to day restocking activities gdocs/excel wins if you really want to optimize the time spent on this activity.

There are many things gdocs can provide, one has to use a bit of imagination + dreaming

What information ideally would I like to know if everything was possible?
There's much much more than price difference of item in X vs Y station that is useful for seeding.

What decisions I make daily when coming to the conclusion on what I should do?
Based on which factors I make those decisions?
What if I could get those decisions automatically done for me?

Is it really worth my time to log character ABC?
If one needs to go through several orders or buy/sales history to figure out if the answer is yes or no, it's already wasted time => Can be done faster with spreadsheets.

I'm using redfrog/my own ship to haul the stuff to the destination. What stuff should I put onboard to have a good profit considering the cargo/collateral limits?

and so on...

Correct questions vary. These may seem like small things, but if one tunes the sheets to do as mush as possible automatically it will result in great time saving & greater profit.

Update:

Station A:

I have decided to not invest much more in station A. I'll focus on a small selection of items that sold well in the past. Orders for other stuff that hasn't sold at all will run out and then be send to station B. I'll also try and find a couple of other similar stations to seed the small selection at.

Station B:

I have hit 5b in sell orders. Not bad considering i hit 4b just 10 days ago and only logged in twice since then. I'm at 190 Sell orders now and started skilling another alt on that account towards trading. So far, it's not dual training. I just paused training indu stuff on the main char for now. I can definitely make more money from trading than i could from being able to invent everything.

I'm also slowly approaching the point where it gets hard to come up with new ideas of what to sell. I know i want to put ammo and ships on the market, but i haven't really invested much there yet. I'll try and find another 80 modules to sell and will then focus on ships and ammo once the next alt has aquired the skills for a considerable amount of sell orders.

Researching and selling BPOs is another venture of mine, but i won't sell the next batch of ship BPOs that come out of the oven. Instead, i'll ship them over to be able to produce on site. Mainly because so many small hulls have pretty extreme negative compression rates.

Producing won't be as profitable as the stuff i'm currently making, but it's going to save me considerable amounts of time and/or shipping cost.

I also don't have my lines active 24/7 anymore because my alliance disbanded and i had to pay back some of my investors.

contracts would be way to annoying to set up.

i prefer to keep things in the market window. and yeah, i'm definitely seeding fits for tristans :)

i already keep eyes on my customers to offer them some deals later, but that's another thing that sounds like way to much effort for me :P

i want to keep this as low maintenance as possible

Update:

Station A:

Some small changes for Station A, i have identified some items in Station B that were selling much better than expected there, so i also put them up at Station A, with good results so far. I also think i have identified why things are moving so slow. The local lowsec is active, but it seems like most people stage from the region next door that has a very well seeded lowsec station close to the border. Lesson learned i guess.

I also have a pretty good basket of items nailed down that i want to start seeding in more than just one station per region. I'll try and identify some good stations for that once i stop being lazy

Station B:

Average profit/day has been 40m over the last week. That's pretty damn good compared to the work i actually put in here (no more than 30 minutes since my last posting)

Sadly, i lost a bit of money due to my own stupidity, but at least i made the guy who recently bought several hunded very cheap mining crystals very happy. Luckily it's never been easier to bring the "do you really want to sell your stuff extremely underpriced" warning back to life.

Some dude also discovered my most profitable item and decided to ruin it by putting up a massively oversized order at a price that is way to close to the one in jita for my liking. I wonder if i should just buy him out or not.

I also identified the first items that i won't reseed once my orders are running out. Not because they aren't profitable or don't sell, but because i think others are going to make me more. Most of them are cheap T1 stuff anyway. And some other items already make more money per sale than these ones make per week.


Station C:

Station C is going to be a mirror of Station B. It's another microhub in another region that i started seeding on another character. So far, i only have 25 or so orders available on that one, so i'll just test the waters for now. I need to know more about my competition there before going in big. The place seems to be highly frequented, but not seeded broadly. Station B is nearly complete for modules, rigs, ammo and hulls. Station C has no meta 4 items, few rigs and even fewer ships available. It has other perks though, such as several Ice belts really close and a few good agents in the area. It also doesn't have skillbooks available within quite a few jumps, which opens yet another business opportunity.

The first Test is looking really good for sales. I actually sold more small drones here over the last two days than i sold in Station B over the last week. Time will tell if that's sustainable. The local lowsec is also not as popular which worries me a bit. A lot of my sales in Station B are quickly turned into lossmails or killmails. My jita indu stuff very likely did the same, but i have rarely ever seen it (except when wheniaminstation bought everything pizza needed to fuel their war machine from me)

Meta:

I wonder if it's a good idea to sell items that are in direct competition with other items i'm selling. An example would be cap boosters. I really want people to buy my navy cap boosters. But will they pick navy ones over normal ones if the normal ones aren't available? or will they fly 5 jumps to pick the normal ones up from another place? I guess i'll make a few tests there over the next weeks.

if you have a specific place in mind, send me a PN with what you need and i'll have orders up soon(tm) :)