The mineral trade.

Discussion in 'Marketplace Discussion' started by Totouga, Feb 13, 2015.

  1. This post will mainly focus on diamonds and emeralds, but will also include the other minerals. This post is also not so I can persuade people to sell me things cheaper, it is to advise people on how they can gain more income by lowering prices.

    Diamonds: diamonds are very hard to come across in single player minecraft, they would should be high in price on EMC, right? wrong! Diamonds are common, in fact! If you vote everyday you will get voting bonuses that tend to include diamonds. Prices are based on supply and demand. the supply is medium to high, and the demand is high. This would place the price of a diamond around 40 rupees to 60 rupees. However, what has happened in the player shops is that greed has factored into the equation and made the price boom. Currently, diamonds are priced at 75 rupees to 100 or so rupees.

    Emeralds:emeralds are also very hard to obtain in single player. However, unlike diamonds they have very little uses and are only used for prettiness. Emeralds are also voting bonuses so a player who votes would have quite a lot building up. but how would you get rid of them? You would sell them for on average 30 rupees. Again, this is too expensive as they have low demand and high supply. I recommend selling them for 15 rupees to 20 rupees.

    Gold: gold is not very rare and is quite useful as horses are a big business. Gold is used for tools, armour and golden foods. therefore, I would price it at around 8 rupees per single ingot.

    Ores: unless the ore is gold or iron, ores tend to be 1 or 2 rupees higher than the ingot purely because of the silk tough needed to obtain it. gold or iron should be about 1 rupee lower.

    Iron: iron is common and high in demand. This means you can get away for selling it slightly higher. I would recommend 3 or 4 rupees.
  2. Here's the thing, though. For someone to try and lower that price without everyone's help would be near impossible because, being relatively cheap compared to other shops, their diamonds would quickly be gobbled up and resold to other shops. In order for something like that to be effective you would need an absolutely massive amount of diamonds.

    Not saying it can't happen, though. *winks*
  3. Yeah, I agree with ZecretAznEks up there; your main concern are other shops.

    Also; I wouldn't be too hasty with assuming that it all boils down to greed. It doesn't have to. If one player simply doesn't fully know what the going prices are and simply used some of his own then it wouldn't be too unlikely that some of the other shop keepers might have copied him.

    For example; say I really want to build a collection of deadbushes; so I buy them for a good price. Chances are high that others might do the same because there's money to be made.

    Also, about those emeralds... I always like to think that those are the currency used in single player. Also because you mainly use those to trade with villagers (which, if you're lucky, can get you some very interesting deals).
    Palmsugar and SecretAznEks like this.
  4. ShelLuser, I didn't say that it is all greed, but merely a factor in the massive sum of the mineral trade.
    ShelLuser likes this.
  5. I do disagree about emeralds being useless, at this point... Working with villagers you can get items that would cost or sell for a lot of rupees (e.g. enchanted book sharpness V, glowstone, bottle of XP, etc.)
  6. Like for example, my match-made-in-hevean of an infinite emerald librarian and an eye of ender priest. :)
  7. I honestly can't agree with much of this.
    Diamonds
    That still doesn't mean they're common, just more so than if voting doesn't exist. Voting only leads to 1-2 a day, which isn't enough for a lot of people.
    Yeah... no. 'Cause, inflation. Aikar is intentionally inflating the economy (and it's working pretty damn well IMO) to raise the prices of all items. This is to create a better market around lower-priced goods, including iron.
    I wouldn't call it greed. Some shop owners will try to get every rupee out of buyers as possible. It's business, and that's how business works.

    If I wanted to sell diamonds for, say, 60r, I could. But why would I (why would anyone) when I could make two times that for no additional effort!?

    Emeralds
    Not really. They're easy to obtain with villagers. I believe that's where pretty much all emeralds come from. It only makes sense to take the ore instead for 200-300r instead of 15.
    I'm still trying to fathom how you think so. Please look at villager trading on the wiki (here's a link for you!) and your statement there may change.
    Again, why wouldn't you make the extra 10-15r per emerald for no additional effort? Emeralds are a very profitable business venture.

    Gold
    The individual pieces are harder to obtain than iron or emeralds.
    Gold tools and armor are rarely used for practical purposes. In fact, it's not practical at all to use gold gear. Apples are very important though.
    The last statement on both of my responses was "why not get a few extra rupees" and I'll use it here too. 12r per piece sounds better than 8r, doesn't it?

    Ores
    You should check your math on this. I've done some quick math:
    Diamond Ore - 2.49x value of diamond
    Emerald Ore - 6x value of emerald
    Redstone Ore - 6.5x value of redstone dust
    Lapis Ore - 10.1x value of lapis
    So yeah, I think you're off a lot there.
    And finally the
    Introduction
    How could lower prices possibly mean more income? It's actually the exact opposite. It works a lot like this:

    Selling goods cheaper will mean more people will want your goods before the competitor's (let's say you're selling diamonds for 75r and that other shop is selling them for 100r). However, you will be constantly out of stock. Then the potential buyers will go to a competitor that sells the same item for a higher price. Even if you sell 25% more than the other shop, you'll make less. And who likes a shop that's constantly out of stock?

    Say you sell diamonds for 100r instead of 75. You'll increase your profits by 25%. However, selling diamonds for, say, 175r means nobody will buy from you. You have to find a nice medium - somewhere where you can sell quickly, but not be constantly out of stock, while keeping pricing competitive.

    By your statement, I believe you're thinking short-term. Yes, I'd go to a shop that sells things cheaper, but then would everyone else. I'd really like to know how you could make more money by selling goods well below market price, at what you said people should be selling at, which is 40r.

    The time of 25r diamonds was long ago and won't come back. It's not meant to. Inflation is actually better for the economy.
    SecretAznEks likes this.
  8. I think you are wrong here. If you sell things for less, you'll have many more customers. If you restock it everyday like you could, yes they would sell out quickly, but you are practically guaranteed more customers who will be looking around the rest of your shop (possibly). I agree with some of your points, but others I think are quite wrong.
  9. I think he is correct. There are people that primarily make their money by going around from shop to shop, buying out stocks of items at lower prices and go to other shops selling at higher (buying) prices. What does this do for the real end customer that you are trying to get your 25% discount to? Nothing. They still end up going to a shop that has high prices to buy the end product while your shop is never visited because you are constantly out of stock. What this does for the shop owner is that it cuts down on their ability to maybe produce their products. Why? Maybe the owner has their entire farming operation used to stock their shop built under the store. They are, at that point, counting on customers visiting their shop in order for their residence's chunks to load so products can grow. If no one visits the shop because they are out of stock constantly for the above reasons then they barely even have products to sell at all. (That was just an example of dual uses for land which a lot of people do) My ending point is that you have to have competitive prices that are in the range of the current economy or you will not really have a business that customers frequent. I know that was a little off topic from the discussion of ore but the basic economics translates across to all products.
  10. You'll get more customers - but when the cheap shops are sold out, people always go to the others. See, people on EMC will buy from shops no matter the cost. Diamonds are reaching the 150r range and people still buy them.

    Perhaps you don't sell out in a day. Perhaps you sell out in two, three, maybe even a week. However, you will still sell all of your goods (well, the majority anyways) and you'll earn 3x as much.
  11. Just a question, where are those numbers coming from in the original post? Is there any math behind it?
  12. I was gonna sit by and just let this pass, but I can't.
    Your ideas seem to be based on a very skinny version of what EMC is when, in reality it is a bustling and robust economy. Emeralds have several uses mainly: Glowstone and Exp bottle creation. To say that they are only for their prettiness is incorrect, especially since very few people use them to decorate.
    PenguinDJ likes this.
  13. I use them to decorate! :eek:
  14. *whispers* me too, but using absolutes gets the point across better.
  15. All that information is completely logical. I can speak from experience being on EMC for almost 3 years now. When I started, diamonds were priced around 50r each. Yeah, that may seem like a good deal, but take it from a competitor's standpoint.

    Situation 1: Low prices, as advised in the original post
    I sell gold for 8r and keep it in a really good stock because I have a giant gold farm or run around killing pigmen in the nether or mine a ton or whatever. A competitor keeps the same stock but undercuts me by 1r. Some huge PvP event is declared and suddenly everybody wants to buy gold to make golden apples and enchanted golden apples. Both my stock of a full single chest and my competitor's stock of a full single chest are bought out in preparation for the event. A single chest is 1728 gold ingots if I did the math right. Therefore, I would gain 8*1728r while my competitor would gain 7*1728r. My competitor only makes 7/8 the amount as I did because they tried to undercut me. The difference in rupees is 1728r.

    Situation 2: Roundabouts for current prices
    I sell gold for 12r an ingot and keep in good stock for the same reasons as stated in the first situation. My competitor undercuts me by selling for 11r with the same stock. The same PvP event is declared and the same rush to buy gold for apples occurs. This time, I make 12*1728r and my competitor makes 11*1728r. My competitor makes 11/12 the rupees I make by undercutting me as little as possible. The difference here is still 1728r.

    Situation 3: Extremely high prices compared to current and suggested
    I sell gold for 50r an ingot and keep it in good stock, just like before. My competitor again undercuts me by 1r. The same PvP event is declared. I make 50*1728r. My competitor makes 449*1728r. My competitor makes 49/50 as much as I do. The difference is still 1728r.

    The economy is purposefully being inflated so players can undercut eachother without needing to lose as much % of the profit. The difference in all three was the same amount of rupees but the difference in percent earned, which is much better to use to judge differences in point of inflation like this in the EMC economy, is as follows: Situation 1, competitor made 87.5% as much; Situation 2, competitor made 91 2/3% as much; situation 3, competitor made 98% as much.

    Looking at this, it isn't that the economy will be better off or anything of the likes if prices are reduced but quite the contrary if the inflation keeps with it. The higher the inflation and base prices become, the greater opportunity for undercutting there is.
    PenguinDJ likes this.
  16. Diamonds have not been 25r for a long time. Back in those days, a very prominent EMCer was one among many caught exploiting a glitch to duplicate items. In such an environment where you could easily (and illegally) produce unlimited diamonds, it made sense to lower prices so you could drain as much money from the economy, without ever running out of stock. There were also various exploits like Xray that people would use to obtain lots of diamonds easily.

    The glitches were fixes, xray no longer works, those players were banned, and low and behold the price of diamonds shot upwards. In addition, Aikar pushed a crazy amount of inflation by massively increesing the money supply via the voting system, and they hit 90r and stayed there for a while, based on the shop selling them for 90r. Then the shop prices were changed, and up they go again. At this point, they sit somewhere around 105r-125r, and are likely to go up further.

    As for pricing strategies, if you are a small shop which produces a specific small set of items, it makes sense to price competitively. You want to ensure that your items sell faster, so you can make money. However, if you are a mall and have a lot of items to sell, you want to ensure that you are competitive for suppliers, that you pay a reasonable price to people who would help you stock. Otherwise, you're not going to have a fun time of restocking everything yourself. With over 700 items in the game, it's just not humanly possible to do the restocking yourself.
    JesusPower2 and bluebiscuit2007 like this.