Knowing what to Merchant
Written by Andrieux
REQUIREMENTS
- Access to the Grand Exchange
- Common Sense
- Patience
ITEMS NEEDED
- Enough GP to have some sit in the Grand Exchange while you do normal RS activities.
PROCESS
Introduction.
Making money by merchanting is extremely easy with the Grand Exchange. The only two things you need to know are (1) how popular an item is and (2) how the item is bought. While this method will trigger one of two reactions, the first being "I already know this" and the second being "Why didn't I think of this?", this method is guaranteed to make you money.
Basically, you're taking items that people don't think twice about buying at max price, and merchenting them. (Buy an item at the lowest price, and sell at the highest. Read this whole post to understand how to do it.)
Before we can merchant...
Think about items that you constantly buy. These items include arrows, bolts, runes, food, and F2P weapons. These are the type of items that you are going to be "flipping". Flipping, or short term merchenting, is the easiest way to merchent. All it requires is 5-10 minutes each day at the Grand Exchange. Once you get the hang of it, though, it will become much easier. To flip an item, you just buy it, and put it right back into the Grand Exchange, and then go about your business. Because the Grand Exchange requires a certain wait time on when an item can sell after it is bought, you can just go and play RuneScape as you normally would, then log in the next day (or a few hours later) and take your cash, and re-invest it, wait a day, and repeat.
Finding the Right Item
Now, I'm not going to reveal every aspect of this method of making money, but I am going to try to throw you onto the right track. Ideally, you are looking for items with a margin of only a few GP between the lowest and highest available buying price. These items, as I mentioned before, include arrows, bolts, runes, food, and F2P weapons. Notice that I said
include; that means that there are many other items you can do this with. So, you're looking for items that are (1) close in the range of lowest and highest available buying prices, (2) bought in bulk, and (3) items that are bought at the highest level so that the consumer can get the item quicker.
Making the Money
Once you have an item in mind, you are going to need to test it. This means buying 100 or so of the item at either
low or medium price. I'd suggest not messing around with a few GP over or under low or medium; just click the button to set it to lowest or medium price. This is because the person you are buying the item from is most likely to sell the item by clicking one of those buttons on the GE interface.
Once you have the item, just withdraw it from the GE and stick in right back in, at the highest price. Wait a while untill it can sell, then go back and take you're
easy earned cash out of the GE, buy the same amount or more of an item (I liked to buy the same amount as I had before, so I could see my profit. It seems silly, but it always but a smile in my mind. Of course, if you want to buy as many as you can with the money you took out of the Grand Exchange, feel free.)
MONEYMAKING FACTS
Factors to Consider
Almost all of these have been mentioned above, but I'll run through them.
- Amount you can buy without spending all the money in your bank,
- How people buy them-do they need the item quickley and hit "Max Price" when purchasing? Think about what you do.
- How popular is this item?
As I close, an example...
I'm buying Death Runes at 249 ea. [low price] and selling at 262 ea. [medium price. I'll also sell at the high price, which I recommend, of 275 ea.].
I have 500,000 GP in my bank, and I want to make a little extra cashflow whilst training slayer. I spend 249,000 GP on 1k death runes, at minimum price. They are all purchased within 5 minutes, while I'm find the gear in my bank-because I refused to conform and use bank tabs. By the time I have my gear for slaying, ally the death runes are bought. I put them right back in GE, at....[follow the ellipses for the two different endings]
...the medium price, because I'm afraid they won't sell quickly at the high price. I go and finish my slayer task, and log off for the night. When I wake up in the morning, I head to GE, and check the death runes. The bar is filled with green, and I find 262,000 GP waiting for me. I made 13,000 GP with less than 10 clicks of the mouse.
...the high price, because I'm ok with waiting a little bit to make more profit. I go and finish my slayer task, and log off for the night. When I wake up in the morning, I head to GE, and check the death runes. The bar is filled with green, and I find 275,000 GP waiting for me. I made 26,000 GP with less than 10 clicks of the mouse.
Now, for those of you thinking "Wow, only 13,000 [or 26,000] GP made. That's not that great." realize that I only put in 249,000 GP. If I had put in 1,000,000 (Well, 996,000, actually), I would have made 52,000 [or 112,000] GP. That's a 5-10% profit based on whether you resell at medium or high. Remember, I suggest reselling at the high price. Either way you're guarenteed profit, but it might take only a small bit longer to resell. Because of the wait period on reselling items, I suggest you just do this before you log out at night, or right when you log in so they can sell while you sleep or while you're out 'Scaping.
The End
The above example shows that this method can be done while you are doing another activity. You don't have to work at all, after clicking an item and an amount. Also, the above example, buying at low and selling at high, makes 26,000 profit to the 249,000 GP I put in. I'm not losing anything but 5 minutes or less of my time. Remember, the more you buy, the quicker you make money.
This post has been edited by Andrieux: 09 December 2008 - 10:55 AM