Guild Wars 2: 5 tips for making money on the trading post – Tip 2

Tip 2: Know your costs

Before you start selling, you need to know how much the item you’re selling costs you. No, that doesn’t mean finding the same item you’ve made on the Black Lion Trading Company (BLTC) and presuming you’ll make a profit if you sell your crafted stuff at about the same price. That’s a good way to lose money. If you want to make money consistently, potentially a lot of money, you have to know your costs.

How do you determine your costs?

Let’s look at a simple example. Let’s say you’re just starting leatherworking and you’ve decided to sell 8-slot  Rawhide Leather Packs. You’re thinking, bags are always easy to sell in MMOs. Everyone wants extra storage room, right? So bags should be a good thing to sell.

First thing you should do is check the current price of 8-slot  Rawhide Leather Packs on the trading post. You’ll discover an 8-slot pack goes for about 40 copper. That’s not much, but it’s something, right? You’ll make yourself some bags and sell them. After all, 40 copper is 40 copper more than you had.

[Hint: Before you make anything for sale on the trading post, check its going sale price, first.]

Before you do that, though, determine your costs. What’s required to make an 8-slot  Rawhide Leather Pack? You need 10 Stretched Rawhide Leather Squares to make one pack, and you need two Rawhide Leather Sections to make one Stretched Rawhide Leather Square. That means your 8-slot Rawhide Leather Pack will cost you 20 Rawhide Leather Sections. A quick look at the trading post shows the cost of one Rawhide Leather Section is 7 copper, so your 8-slot Rawhide Leather Pack costs you 140 copper to make. That’s your cost.

Even if you gathered all your mats, determine the cost of your crafted item by how much it would cost you to buy all the mats from the trading post.

In this case, it’s not worthwhile making and selling the 8-slot bag. You’ll make more money by selling the Rawhide Leather Sections.  But wait. Let’s look at the trading post, again. What’s the going price of those Stretched Rawhide Leather Squares. Hmmm. There’s a market distortion, it seems: Stretched Rawhide Leather Squares are going for 18 copper. They should be selling for 14 copper – the price of 2 Rawhide Leather Section. Heck, craft yourself some Stretched Rawhide Leather Squares.

By spotting market distortions like the squares, i.e. items selling for more or less than they should, you’ll make yourself some easy money.