Everything About The Auction House (Final Fantasy FFXI)
There are a number of great articles about how to use the auction house currently listed here at MPS but each of them focuses on a different aspect. The goal of this article is to get all of the information into one place.
Buying
Many times you will find that you need something that isn’t available from the vendors in town. You could try and find it yourself, or become a guildsman and make it, but it is a lot easier to just buy it from someone else who has already done the work. This is where the auction house comes in, it lets you buy things from other players without having to /shout your sales around town or hunt down various guildsmen.
The first step to buying at the auction house is finding the item you want. For the most part, everything is categorized nicely and easy to find. If you are unable to find the item you are looking for (quest items specifically) I would check the Misc. section. You can also sort many of the categories by pressing enter on an item in the list and selecting sort. This comes in handy when you are looking for weapons, armor, and spells because you can sort it by level, putting all of the stuff for your level together (it is sorted descending so low level stuff is at the bottom). Another useful navigation tool is the left and right arrows, these work as page down and page up.
Once you have located the item you are interested in you will need to check to see if any are in stock. You do this by looking to the right of the item at the number listed inside of the square brackets [ ]. The number listed is the number of this item that is currently on sale. NOTE: there may be another number to the left of this one that says either 12 or 99. This number is for items that are selling in stacks of size 12 or 99.
If the item you want is in stock you then need to gauge how much it’s worth. You do this by going into the price history and checking to see what the last 10 people paid for that auction. What you are looking for is a general idea of what the item is worth. So if the last 10 items sold for 1000-1200 Gil, you can assume the item is worth around 1100. It’s also a good idea to ignore any prices that are way out of range. For example, if nine of the items go for close to 1100G, but one of them went for 3000G, you can expect to pay 1100G generally.
Once you have an idea about the price you will want to go back to the item list (escape) and select to buy the item. When you place your first bid you will want to place it lower than what the item is valued at. You do this to see if you can get a deal on the item from someone selling for cheap. So if the item was around 1100G, then start your bidding at 900G. More than likely you will be told that you were unable to buy the item at that price. Do not worry, you will not be charged for items you do not successfully buy.
Assuming you do not get the item at 900G, try buying again at 950G or 1000G. If you fail, try a little higher, may be 1050. Keep working your way up in 50G or 100G increments until you either are finally able to purchase the item or the price gets too high to be worth it. Once you succeed in your purchase the item will be added to your inventory and you will be deducted the amount of Gil you offered.
Selling
Making money at the Auction House by selling items is the fastest way to get rich. You can sell items for 100s or 1000s of Gil that would normally sell at vendors for pennies.
The first step to selling items at the auction house is finding out how much they are worth. You do this the same way a buyer would, by going into the buy section and checking out the price history. Unlike the buyer however, you will need to pay closer attention to some of the information given to you in order to receive the best price for your items.
Once you have an idea of the items value, you will want to go back a few menus (escape) and select the option to sell items. Pick the item out of your inventory and sell it with the reserve price (this is the price you are asked to enter) at about the same price as everyone else. NOTE: although pricing your item lower than the going rate will sometimes get your item sold faster, it can really hurt the market and cause the value of that item to decrease very quickly. So try to avoid this.
When a buyer goes to purchase your item you will be paid as much as they bid, but no less than your reserve price. This means that if you set your items value at 1050G and they bid 1100G, you will be paid 1100G.
Working the Market
As a seller there are a number of factors that you will want to look at if you want to make the most profit from your sales. With enough practice, you can actually make money just by buying and selling products at the Auction Houses.
One thing you want to check out is the volatility of the item. You can do this by looking at the dates of purchase listed to the left of the item price in the price history. If all the purchases happened earlier in the day, then the item is selling pretty frequently. If the item has only sold once a week then the item isn’t selling very often. This information alone doesn’t really help you by itself; you need to compare it with the number of items in stock.
If the item you are looking at is selling 10 times a day and there is only a few or none in stock, then it is more than likely under valued. This means that you could sell it for more than it has been going for and probably still make the sale. When raising the value of an item you can not increase the price too greatly the first time. Let’s say you are selling an item that has been going for around 1000G but is currently out of stock. If you raise the price to 2000G you probably won’t make a sale because the price change is to drastic, no one knows how high you went and they aren’t going to spend 10 minutes trying every price between 1000G and 2000G. If you increase the price to 1100G or 1200G though, it is likely that you will make a sale because the buyer will test a little above the last sale price. If you have multiples of the same item you can raise the price slowly with each item, so you could sell the first at 1050, then 1100, 1150, 1200, etc., slowly increasing the value of the item.
If the item you are selling has only been sold once a week and there are no items in stock then there is a good chance you have stumbled across a rare item and you can go through the same process as above. However, items like these may not sell as quickly because there aren’t always buyers for them.
If the item you are interested in selling has been selling a lot and there are a lot in stock, your best bet is to go with the norm and price your item right along with everyone else’s. Whatever you do, don’t go below the current going price for the item! If you do, you will lower the market value of it and hurt not only yourself but your fellow sellers as well. A perfect example of this is Earth Crystals. The high level players from Japan use these for item synthesis and will pay well over 1000G for a stack of 12. However, when all of the US players joined up they dropped the market value for them to well below what they are worth by trying to sell them at lower prices than everyone else. If all of these players would have just kept with the going rate we would all be wealthier.
Selling for Newbs
The section you have all been waiting for: how can I make money off of commodities under level 10. You can actually get pretty wealthy even at low levels by selling commodities to the higher level players. They don’t want to go around killing low level creatures to get something that drops off of one in ten of them, so they will buy those items from you. And since you are killing these creatures any way it doesn’t take any extra effort on your part.
Most of the low level money makers are going to be items that sell in stacks of 12. The main exception to this is ore which can sell pretty good in singles (it does not stack). I have compiled a list of items that I have found in my travels from 1-10 hunting around Bastok along with their approximate values at the time of this writing. All the items in the list are priced per stack of 12 unless it can not be stacked.
Misc.
3000 Fire Crystal
1000 Ice Crystal
1400 Wind Crystal
0500 Earth Crystal
1000 Lightning Crystal
0400 Water Crystal
8000 Light Crystal
3500 Dark Crystal
2000 Zeruhn Suit
5500 Herb Seeds
5000 Vegetable Seeds
8000 Fruit Seeds
2000 Grain Seeds
2000 Honey
Food:
1000 Bird Egg
Alchemy
3500 Beehive Chip
2200 Bat Wing
1100 Treant Bulb
Boneworking
0900 Bone Chip
Weaver (could be wrong)
1600 Bird Feather
Tanner
Rabbit Hide
Blacksmith
0600 Flint Stone
1000 Beast Coin
