I see my name. xD Wait! Someone actually listens... Yay. Well anyways, if you want to try running a shop you could help me run one of my shops. That should give you a good idea of the items which need to be stocked. The advantage for you would be a pretty low risk and benefit from my global stocking and all my pricing experience. The benefit for me is that I know you'd be active and dedicated to growing the shop. I would split the profits with you. I have an inventory management system to track inventory levels based on rupee history (dedicated account for each shop), and the corresponding profit generated from every transaction. I'm still getting this all working, but one of the things I'm noting is that shops gain a lot from having someone active to promote them. You generally want to have at least 1 million rupees to start a large shop. Consider that a DC of quartz blocks is somewhere around 140k, a DC of glowstone 70k, a DC of obsidian 70k, a SC of diamonds 170k, half a stack of beacons 480k, etc... That's already 930k for a decent stock of just 5 items! To answer your original question, here are the top sellers as I see it: - Diamonds always. - Quartz. - Wood. - Stone/cobble. - Sand/glass. - Redstone stuff. - Obsidian. Of course there's lots. I spent weeks making my shop designs based on what people mentioned in chat and in a thread I made and my own experience with shops, and now all that remains is to stock it all over many weeks and find a way to promote the shops.
My shop is small, and I tend to sell whatever I have in overstock. I keep a close lookout on prices, however. A few observations for you: -Valuable minerals sell for high prices, but their scarcity makes it difficult to keep them stocked. A key issue here is the effort it takes to make a given amount of money. You will do better with these if you also BUY them, allowing players to do the work for you. Make the buy price relatively high for these, as you can dump them fast and make a quick margin on the transaction. Say, 20% or so. -Quartz and Glowstone are the exceptions. If you are willing to brave the nether, they are very easy and quick to mine, and prices are sky-high. Players use them in volume, but many aren't willing to mine it themselves. You may make money faster here by using sell signs only and doing the leg-work yourself. Volume Stone/Wood/Sand/Obs/Coal- These items must be sold in high volumes to make much money. If you are going to stock them, be prepared to use top-level tools in order to gather enough of them to be worth your while. Balance your prices low enough so that players come to you often, and buy a lot. There's no sense making 10r more on each purchase if you only get half the purchases. Process these materials as much as possible. Sell smooth stone, not cobble. Sell glass, not sand, etc. Organics -Players do not buy enough farmables to warrant putting much effort into these. Prices and volumes are low, because everyone and their dog has a farm. Keep a small stock for new players to get them to come to your shop. -Leather, and spawn eggs, are exceptions to this. In particular: Wolves, Ocelots, and, recently, Rabbits fetch high prices. Low-Value Raws. Iron, redstone, gold, and the like are relatively common and fetch low prices. They may not be worth your effort to gather and stock as raw resources. Each of these, however, can be processed into very valuable items. Anything made with redstone, for example, is fairly expensive compared to the base components needed to make it. Whether you want to craft and stock the huge variety of items, or make them on-demand for customers, is up to you. I prefer the latter. It takes more effort to advertise and build relationships with customers, but I don't have to stock 20 different kinds of redstone items. I can just stockpile the base resources and craft to fill orders as needed. 1.8 The economy really hasn't had time to settle on prices for the new materials yet. I expect andesite, granite, slime blocks, etc. will be pretty valuable though, despite being easy to get. -Wow that ran a lot longer than I intended. -TL;DR: The effort required to make a given amount of money is different for each item. Pay attention to this. -Builds
You are welcome I hope it helps. As a side note, I just put up an auction last night of 1 DC Polished Andesite + 1 DC Polished Granite, more as an experiment than anything else. I wanted to get a feel for demand and prices on the new blocks. I posted it in the early hours of the morning, and people were already in a bidding war within 10 minutes. Its currently sitting at 30k. That's 277r PER STACK. Its safe to say that, in the short term at least, any effort you can put into selling the new 1.8 blocks, particularly the stuff people haven't been stockpiling for the last year (like slime and lapis), will be well rewarded. I expect prices to drop after a while, but right now there is a huge pent-up demand and little supply. That's good for shopkeepers! -Builds
