Since I am fairly new on this server, I have a question about the following (hypothetical) situation: Let's say I have found two shops (which I don't own): Shop A and shop B. Shop A: Buys product x for 20r / piece Sells product x for 25r / piece Shop B: Buys product x for 12r /piece Sells product x for 15r / piece That means that if I buy product x from shop B, and sell it in shop A, I will make a profit of 5r per product. Is that allowed, or not? I don't really see why it is not allowed (because everything is still fair: the seller of shop B is also allowed to sell his products directly to shop A) but I better ask before I mess something up.
Yes. That's business. However, if someone catches you buying their items and reselling them, they may ban you from their shop or even /ignore you.
Yes it is allowed. Some shop owners (mostly the sellers, not the buyers) get peeved (for no logical reason) and will ban you from their res, but you have not broken any rules. It is in fact a good strategy to make money, just make sure you don't buy too much and end up losing money + gaining excess of a product you don't need.
Thnx, haven't found a way to determine how much another shop will buy from a player (some don't have enough money left, others no space?) so I have to be careful with that as well. Now I have set up a database that contains the player/residence and its products for buy/sell price. Then it compares the products with all the other shops in the database and returns the most cheapest buy for the player, most profitable sell for the player and the combination of shops where the case as described above occurs. Weird enough, it happens more than once that you can just ship products between shops and make a profit. (and I hope most people won't hate me for it...)
If you right click a buy sign (or buy chest = you selling to them) with an empty hand and without the item listed in your inventory, it will either tell you that you don't have enough of the item to sell, or that the chest is full. This makes it easy to determine if a buy chest is at max capacity, and you will often find that items such as 'wheat' are constantly full. If I see a large price difference where the buy chest is giving me a good margin, then I always check to see if the chest is full so that I don't goof and buy a ton of the item just to find that the chest was already full.
Its allowed as long as your not selling it back to the same person. Sources: My knowledge of empireminecraft from 2012.
Of course. However they could ban you from their plot but their is nothing against EMC rules for that
Hey if you want to see some arbitrage opportunities you may find some on my site: http://www.azoundria.com/emc/market/ I already have a pricing database going and it would be awesome if after you buy/sell stuff you add it to the site so others can benefit too. Hopefully out of all this we will end up with fairly consistent and reliable prices. I know for example, that gravel varies incredibly widely. Some places pay 1/4r and some 4r! Of course some shops get upset when you buy them out of their stock they spent all day getting and they find out you sold it for more. Ultimately, they will raise prices and make more money in the long run so even though they are upset right now you're actually helping them make more money. The shop who is willing to pay more probably really needed the items.
Looking for a "sell" shop? Try The Hoard @ 18721. Start a convo with me if I'm ever full, I may make room. I can also let you know what I really want (diamonds, lapis, quartz, clay, obsidian, glowstone, etc)
Nice website azoundria, i'll use it Matthew I'll visit your shop and try to find great prices. Will definitely sell some if there is a profit Thnx.
Just to explain about why sellers may not like this activity. Some shop keepers are actually trying to serve the community by making items available at a cheap price for new players. In order to avoid always being out of stock, they are forced to match the prices of the highest buy shop. If I am trying to earn rupees, then I would match the sell prices of the mall, but not all players have that goal. I stopped trying to offer cheap prices in favor of keeping items in stock for when people really need them. In some ways the buying selling activity is really good, so that if someone just wants to produce wood for sale, then other players will buy it and find someone to sell it to. Not everyone cares to server hop and learn all the sellers and keep track of all those details.
It's a good argument. I don't remember how much new players start with, but I seem to recall about 1,000 rupees. I also know voting can easily gain you another 1,000 rupees. Logs are an easy business to get into to make more rupee and only require 3 diamonds (max of 240r). You get your investment back by chopping two stacks of logs, and still have the remaining 1,760 rupees! Remember that new players start with armor and saplings and tools and a whole bunch of things already. To a new player, they don't even know the value of a rupee or what prices are cheap or expensive. You might be being nice and giving a good deal to them, but they wont even know it unless you told them. In fact, you might even end up making them think prices should be cheaper than the typical market, and pricing their stuff for less, in which case they get less money and a slower start. I remember when I first started I had to do a lot of guesswork. I priced my first logs too cheap and people bought it all out. Then I priced it higher and people were still buying it. Higher, and people stopped buying it. I figured it out but I lost money and opportunity. It would have really helped if the prices were more consistent for me so I could know what to price it at and get a steady income. I'm not too concerned if I can get my starting axe a bit cheaper because I only pay that once, but if I get less per stack of logs or lose sales because they are priced too high, it has a huge effect on what else I can do.
Thnx for the explanation, somehow I understand the reason, but I merely agree with Azoundria. I don't know when you should be called a "new member" but I am at this server for... I guess a week now. It is true what Azoundria says, you start with a lot of items, I got 5 sheep, 5 cows, 5 chicks, and fancy axe,pickaxe, shovel, sword, diamond armour and a bunch of other things... Oh 6 diamonds because I registered @ the forum and starting money (mine was 3000 and could vote aswell so that was... something between 800-1000). It gave me a nice start, could built a shed for my animals, could survive in the wilderness until the armour was worn out and I just started looking for seeds, found a watermelon there, and collected a few saplings. Started farming @ my residence and had to figure out some price (still havn't done that yet because now I want a nice store instead of a chest in the middle of my property ). I also wanted to make money as soon as possible, so buying stuff at other stores was useless in my opinion since I could get my items from the wastelands. Well to make a long story short: I have figured that the arbitrage business is not an infinite income source. It still requires you to travel along the shops (have only been doing it on my own server), collect all the information (which is actually a pain in the ass) and most of the time the big profits are made at stores that are either sold out or the player doesn't have enough money. If you trade between the bigger guys (that most often returns a smaller profit), you just make less money and it costs time. So in the end: I was not looking for a cheap shop to buy from, I never would've as a new player. And I have been walking around the server a lot now because I had to collect data to try out arbitrage. Now I know more about the server, know more players by name, have a better feeling for this economy than when I started, have gained creative ideas for my own buildings thnx to the buildings of others and I think I know better what is important in your shop/not. So, in my case, arbitrage even helped me to gain experience more quickly then I would've without it (but still have a lot to learn).
