9 replies to this topic

[Nymh]

The Official Price Check Thread has become overrun with people asking for prices on NP items lately, and I don't understand why. When you ask someone to check a price for you, they are not doing anything that you could not do yourself. I wondered why people would be asking for prices on NP items and I have come to the conclusion that they may not know the steps that are taken to check the prices, or are not confident that the conclusions they come to are correct. So I have written this guide to help you feel more confident in pricing NP items.

I will take some examples straight from the Official Price Check Thread and walk you through the process that I personally go through when pricing these items.

Example A:

Price check on Pirate Meerca Morphing Potion. I have a feeling the prices on TP are too low. Maybe not?

What I am going to do first is go to our item DB and look up the price of all the pirate morphing potions to compare them.

Spoiler

Now that I have learned roughly what these can be bought and sold for in relation to the rest of the MPs, I will look on Neopets to see what they are going for at the moment:

Spoiler

I can stop here, I have my answer. If I want my potion to sell, I will have to price it lower than 200k NP on the TP. Pricing it at 99,999 in my shop would probably offload it quicker and with less hassle. Alternatively I could hang onto it hoping that the price will go up after the cheaper ones sell (protip: this rarely works out the way you want it to).

I always scratch my head when I see people ask for price quotes on items like this. They are not super rare, there are plenty of them on the TP with prices, and they are not newly released items. TRUST YOURSELF! You already know the answer

Example B:

Kadoatie Biscuits?

Unpriced on the TP and here

Ahhh, more of a challenge, an unpriced item. Just to be sure (not that any of you would ever overlook this) I will double-check our iDB and the Neopets TP to be sure that there are no current prices on this item at the time (which there are not). Next thing I will do will be to go to JellyNeo's Item Database to find the rarity index of the item and when it was released.

Spoiler

This will put this item in a predictable price range somewhere around 200-500k. Higher rarity gourmet/kad foods can get into the millions but they are HTS and you will probably end up deflating them anyway. If the item was super new I would put it closer to 700-800k but since these items are meant to be consumed people don't tend to pay ridiculous amounts for them unless they are crazy rare or collectable.

Example C:

Can I have the price for a :

Worn Leather Yurble Belt. Can't find a price and got it through a Treasure Map

Keep in mind that this PC was requested on 2 June, 2012. Checking the Neopets TP and our iDB turns up nothing, so off I go to JN again...

Spoiler

Because this item had just been released in the last couple of days, scarcity will artifically inflate the price to around 700-800k. Once more of them become available, some different factors will come into play. It is a less popular species, it's a belt, and it's not super high rarity - I would predict that it will be worth ~200-300k in a few weeks.

I would encourage everyone to attempt to price the items yourself before asking for a price quote from the forum. The more you do it, the more confident you will be in your own pricing abilities. If you do happen to price an UB incorrectly, it is not hard to figure out. It will either rot on the TP with no offers (priced too high) or you will get a handful of offers immediately (priced too low). So don't be scared! Just jump in and start pricing

If you have any questions or suggestions please let me know!

[Iterative]

Thanks for the guide! This is really helpful to me since I'm pretty hopeless at pricing things. The unpriced everywhere UB is always the one I struggle with. Out of curiosity: Do you have sort of "price guidelines" for where things will fall depending on the item's rarity? I am especially unsure what I should be selling my r99s for, as they vary quite widely in price, but anything in the r95-r99 range seems to be unpredictable to me in terms of price.

High-demand items like stamps and gourmet foods especially seem to have a huge variance in price for similar rarity and I have no idea what determines it.

[Yac]

Very useful information, thank you!
I always hated when people on the TP refused to flat-out tell you a price for an item, hopefully trying to get you to offer more than the item was really worth at the time.

[kamelonu]

+rep
Much needed

And Nymph i want more pictures of you doodling on them.

[Iterative]

I run into this problem A LOT and it pisses me off more than anything.
I'm trying to buy items for my gallery and people outright refuse to tell you what they want for an item.
They expect you to magically guess what they want, and if you don't offer it, they will most likely block you. So effing moronic.

It gets even better when they don't respond AT ALL, so you're just left hanging. But yeah. A lot of trading just feels like two people trying not to be the first one to blink (i.e. offer a price on an item).

Most of the time, if an item I have is unpriced, it's because I don't know what to price it for, and what I'll accept depends on how long it's been up rotting in my lots and annoying me with the sight of them. Resellers probably love me for my impatience. XD

[Iterative]

I tell people it's for my gallery and not to resell in hopes that they will just tell me what they want for it, but that rarely ever happens. =|

I suspect the key as a buyer is to go for the accounts that don't look like they're hardcore TCers/resellers. I sell most everything under 200k for 99,999 in my shop, and I do a lot of quicksales to resellers because getting most of my profits in through rather risky ABing makes me a bit more chilled out about selling things for cheap. I'm pretty sure there's one dude who probably checks on my lots every day for how often I get offers from him, but I know I'm just exchanging time for NPs, and I'd rather have pure *now* that I can launder elsewhere than to have a bunch of HTS items that could be frozen with my account in the future.

Edited by Iterative, 09 June 2012 - 10:39 AM.