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Flipping salvage – the buy

In an attempt to update and better logically split this information, I have moved this post and made edits to it on a new GamerDemos’ page titled Flipping Salvage which you can reach by clicking the Flipping Salvage link or finding it at the top of any page on my site. Check out updates there and look for updates on market crashes and the sell process on successive pages from there.  The original post remains below.

As one of those ebil market manipulators, I figure I can share a little knowledge on what I do to earn easy influence and infamy in game. Mostly, I work in flipping rare arcane salvage. The margin on this is not nearly as great as the margin on flipping IOs or buying recipes and selling crafted IOs, but the work is easy, and you can do this with one character without ever moving around. Log in, collect salvage, list it for sale, put in more bids, log out and play your other characters.

With minimal time and effort, I turned 7 million influence on my Dark/Dark defender into well over 100 million. Then I started working with recipes and flipping crafted IOs, and have again nearly doubled my holdings, in addition to slotting more sets with a rough market value of 75 million at the time I bought and crafted things. Here are some specific examples of what I’ve done, along with some notices of the kinds of problems you can encounter with this method.

The time investment is substantially less than it will seem if you read this through, because I do a lot of checking while actively buying and selling other items.

For this example, I’m looking at Magical Conspiracy. This is a salvage item I haven’t ever used for flipping, so I’m showing you exactly how I evaluate a salvage type to see if I can flip it for profit. Before I start working a category, I make several checks. Early in the morning on the first time I checked Magical Conspiracy salvage, here’s what I saw:

magical-conspiracy_check01.jpg

My initial thinking is there’s slim to non-existent margins there. But you can’t give up after a single check, so I came back later in the day and checked again. About 4 hours after the first check, here’s what I saw:

magical-conspiracy_check02.jpg

Hmmm. Still not looking to good. I’ll make a few more checks just to see, but this is looking like a 100,000 influence margin best case. So, another 3 hours, another check:

magical-conspiracy_check03.jpg

I’m going to wait for one more check, but this looks like a tough profit center. I don’t like to make less than 5% after market fees on salvage flips, and I honestly tend to do much better than that. So what happens 2 hours after the latest check?

magical-conspiracy_check04.jpg

Let’s face it – based on a single day’s checks, this doesn’t look like an item to work. Still, I’m going to shoot for it. First, I put in a lowball bid to test whether the low end is really 2.6 million or whether I can undercut that if I’m patient:

magical-conspiracy_bid01.jpg magical-conspiracy_bid01-made.jpg

However, I’m also going to make a non-lowball bid at a price I’m sure can make it, plus one more slightly below what I know I can get just to try finding the bottom.

magical-conspiracy_bid02.jpg magical-conspiracy_bid02-made.jpg

magical-conspiracy_bid03.jpg magical-conspiracy_bid03-made.jpg

Even before I could log out after making those bids, the 1st of these two bids was successful. While testing a new area to try for profit, I keep doing the items I know will work. I typically let the test bids and test sales for a little while, checking back in 30 minutes to 2 hours later.

Once you play around enough to figure out where your purchase range is that lets you grab a stack of salvage, you have to test the selling price you need to set to earn your profit. This is the only hard part of the process, as you can easily set your price too high and lose sales to other market manipulators. I’ve suffered most of my losses from setting the price too high compared to other marketeers, or occasionally at a normally reasonable price that fails because of a price crash (more on this later).

Today I was buying and selling deific weapons for more than 10% per sale, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but is enough on a 3.8-4.0 million item to make it worth my time. I can typically buy and sell 10-30 deifics per day, averaging better than 3.8 million per item. So that’s grabbing over 400,000 per item times 10-30 items. I have had days, in fact, where I turned better than 25% profit, which on a stack of 10 deific weapons runs well over 2 million, sometimes hitting 3.0-3.5 million for the stack. That’s small potatoes to what you can get with a little time invested in recipes and flipping crafted IOs, but for work that doesn’t involve moving your character at all, it’s pretty good.

Next post, I’ll cover the selling and the waiting, and as an added bonus, I get to throw in the price crash, since that’s what happened to me while I was working on this post and playing with this salvage.

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