Junkyard pile (continued):
The two primary ways to make money off the items you get are reselling them for a profit and reprocessing them for minerals. Tech 2 items can be easily resold in one of the main trade hubs like Jita, Oursulaert, Rens, Motsu, Hek, Dodixie or Amarr. Tech 1 items may be resold or reprocessed depending on which will give the most profit. Keep in mind that some named modules actually refine into fewer minerals than their standard Tech 1 counterparts. In most cases this means the meta level 1 versions of items are worth less than the standard equipment on the open market.
The key to maintaining profitability in this business is picking your items well, knowing what everything is worth and knowing exactly what they all refine into. It's vital that you buy items for less than you can profit off them and there are a few tools available that can help with this. Refining and market skills are your friend in this profession, increasing the yield you get from refining and the number of buy and sell orders you can have up at the same time.
Supply the demand:
The EVE universe is an absolutely huge place and there are people all over the galaxy in need of supplies. New ships, modules and ammo are needed everywhere but the majority of trade and manufacturing clusters around just a few trade hubs. The time it takes for someone to travel to a trade hub and buy something has a value, and you can use this to your advantage. After all, why would someone spend half an hour trudging across the region and back to get some ammo when there's some for sale right on his doorstep? By buying items cheaply in the trade hubs and hauling them to outlying systems, you can put them up for sale at a marked up price and make some profit. People will often accept the higher prices over the time and effort of travel another system.
Of course effort of travel isnt the only factor at work. People's play time may be limited and the fact that Jita is a laggy place with local channel full of scam contract spam is a big deterring factor to going there. It will take a lot of experimentation to figure out the best locations to sell items at, which items will sell and how much mark-up you can charge. You'll need to have good market skills to maximise the number of sell orders you can have active at any given time. To make a good profit, it's wise to spread sell orders out over many locations so that people are always at most a few jumps from your items. Keep an eye on your markets and make sure you're the cheapest seller in your station as sales always go to the cheapest sell order in a given station.
Summary:
Trading is one of EVE's more free-form occupations and it comes in many forms. The few described in this article are very well suited for newer players who don't want to leave high security space. With some practice, you'll have your own little market empire producing ISK. In next week's part of this concise guide to trading in EVE Online, I delve into the biggest trading moneymakers for the cutthroat businessmen amongst you. I'll cover the art of margin trading on the market and in contracts, how to make money from market speculation around patches and the dirty art of market manipulation.
Brendan "Nyphur" Drain is an early veteran of EVE Online and writer of the weekly EVE Evolved column here at massively.com. The column covers anything and everything relating to EVE Online, from in-depth guides to speculative opinion pieces. If you want to message him, send him an e-mail at brendan.drain AT weblogsinc DOT com.
