The Wills Guide to Merchating

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Firstly, if you want me to cover any other topics please request it and i will write about it asap!

 

General overview

 

 

Many people may think of merching as simply buying a item and a certain price and selling for more, therefore making a profit, well in basic terms that is correct, but with the complex system that RS has there is much more to know, and will take months of practice and learning to fully get to grips with how merchanting works on RS.

 

Firstly, lets start of with the grand exchange. The grand exchange (GE) is the centre of all trading and just about everybody in RuneScape uses it to buy, sell, or stand around and trade face to face. Plus, it is what affects the prices of every single trade-able item. Whether you're a merchant, skiller, or fighter, you need the grand exchange to play the game to the full.

 

The prices on the grand exchange are updated daily, averaging just under every 24 hours, however a update can take anywhere from 8 hours to 40 hours and is random. Many items change price daily however some items which are sold in much smaller volumes update only once every several days, these are called "stepped items".

 

One of the most important features to be familiar with when merchanting is the 4 hour limit. Jagex have set this on items and it ranges from 2 per 4 hours to 25k per 4 hours. For a list of the trade limits please go to the flipping section.

 

Another thing you have to be familiar with is the item graphs, these give you most of the information about a item that you need, from something simple like what the current price is to other things such as, is it stepped or does it update daily, what are the highest and lowest prices it has been, ect.

 

When people choose a item to merch, it has to fall into the right section. For example, it has to be relatively hard to obtain, - you wouldnt merch dragon scimitars as players can buy from a shop. You have to take into consideration the 4 hour limit on the item, if it is very low such as a treasure trail item, it will probably be hard to keep bought out therefore it could be a problem to merch. Also you have to take into consideration the maximum potential of a item. Eg: you wouldn't merch prayer potions because they would be very hard to get a good % rise on, this is for many reasons: A lot of people would just collect the supplies to make them and see it as "free herblore xp", because of this it would be very hard to keep the item bought out and would use up alot of cash.

 

Public merch clans such as "wefightge" are going to choose different items to a private merch clan, this is because public merch clans have hundreds of players investing in their item therefore they can choose higher volume items, however private merch groups have a lot less members and would therefore choose lower volume items.

 

At the end of a merch the item will be "junk" and you have to sell this asap before you loose your profit , there are many ways to do this some are easier than others..

 

"Sniping" rare or mini rare items is one way of getting rid of your junk. Items that have "street" value are very useful to help you rid your junk. For example: Item A has a trade price of 5m however its street price is 50m, therefore you can sell 45m junk along with the item.

You "snipe" a item by putting in a offer within seconds of a grand exchange update, there are a few ways you can get notification of updates, please refer to the camping section for more info

 

Junk trading is another way to rid your junk, this is where you trade some cash and some junk for a item, common items that can be done with are godwars items and barrows items.

I will be shortly uploading one of my junk trading guides and i will link it on this thread :)

 

Hope that helped for any players new to the merchanting world

 

 

Flipping

 

 

 

Flipping is a increasing in fashion within runescape as more players are adapting to the "minimal effort maximum profits" style of playing. Flipping in a simple definition is buying a item at a certain price and selling for a higher price via the grand exchange. The grandexchange system is what brings the attraction to flipping because players can spend 5 minutes updating their offers then come back later and collect their profits without having to do any hard work.

 

As most of you already know there is a maxiumum amount of a item that you can buy via the grand exchange every 4 hours, this varies from 2 - 25,000, the list of limits can be found under the flipping spoiler.

 

 

 

 

 

Commonly flipped items include godwars gear, whips, herbs, and by the richer players furies. Players can really start to take advantage of the grand exchange sytem when they can afford the fury limit (100 per 4 hours) at around 17m per fury just a 1% margine in the buy and sell price would result in 17m profit!

 

How to flip

Firstly check that the item you want to flip is not crashing, you can do this by looking at its graph found in the grandexchange database (game guides - grand exchange)

find out the limit of the item (common item limits are above)

(using whips as a example) say that whips were 3346k each put a offer in for 1 whip at 3,250,001 remember to always round over your buy offers and round down your sell offers.

because whips are a commonly traded item you should get the limit in 4 hours at this price, however if they dont buy at your set price then consider rising the price up a little (for this example) 3,275,001 remembering to round over your buy offer

for your sell price don't be too greedy, whips are a very safe flip as they are a stable item, in this example your sell price should be 3,374,999 or 3,399,999 giving you a profit of 1-1.5m from a flip of 10 whips

 

 

Item Limits

 

 

Cooking & Fishing

Raw fish 20,000

Food 10,000

Pizza 1000

Grapes 1000

 

Construction

Plank 10,000

Flatpack 100

 

Ranging & Fletching

Flax 25,000

Arrowtip 10,000

Unstrung bow 10,000

Bow string 10,000

Arrow, Knife, Dart 10,000

Feather 10,000

Crossbows 100

 

Crafting

Clay 25,000

Hide 10,000

Gem 5,000

Jewellery 5,000

Battlestaff 100

 

Farming

Bush seed 100

Allotment seed 500

Herb seed 100

Tree seed 100

 

Woodcutting & Firemaking

Log 25,000

Ashes 10,000

 

Herblore

Herb 10,000 (both for clean and grimy however limits aren't linked)

Vial 10,000

Swamp Tar 5,000

Limpwurt roots 10,000

 

Mining & Smithing

Ore 25,000

Bar 10,000

 

Armours & Weapons

Dragon equipment 10

Dragon square shields and med helms 100

God Wars' armour 10

Slayer items 10

Barrows 10

 

Hunter

Chinchompa 20,000

Hunter Kit 100

Salamander 10,000

Impling Jars (varies)

Furs 100

 

Runecrafting

Rune Essence 25,000 (pure and regular are not linked)

Tiara 1,000

 

Treasure trail, Royal and Discontinues

2

(excluding TT teleports nails pouches and scrolls)

 

Summoning

Talisman 5,000

Pouch 5,000

Spirit Shard 25k

 

Prayer

Bones/big bones etc 10,000

wyvern bones,frost dragon bones 1,000

 

 

 

Junk Trading

 

 

Junk trading is the most popular way of players getting rid of their merched items. (or junk from buying rares). There are several ways to rid your junk, some alot easier than others, however it is something that all merchants need to do so they dont loose profits on their items! I will try to explain the most common ways that are currently used in runescape.

 

#1 Trading off junk with rares:

This is the easiest of all the methods, however this can also turn into one of the most time consuming ways! Most discontinued items have a "street price" as im sure you are aware, the idea of trading junk of with rares is that you add your junk to your rare item until the trade price is matching the street price of the item. One thing that many players get confused with, is adding up the total street price without deducting the trade price of the rare items, for example; (17th November 2010)

A fury kit is around 100m street, however the fury kit itself is only 5.5m therefore you are ridding around 95m junk per fury kit. They are the most cost effective rare to have at current times as they do not take up a lot of cash. In theory a fury kit is stronger in trade / street value than a white partyhat! People who don't fully understand the trade / street price would get confused with some items such as a purple partyhat (around 1.2b street) so they may assume that it is worth 12 fury kits. However what they have to calculate is the trade price as well as the street price. At around 500m trade price and 1.2b street a purple partyhat is around 700m junk. 12 fury kits is about 1.15b junk! you would be overpaying by 450m street!

 

Going back to junk trading with rares, the downside of this is that you have to spend potentialy several hours "camping" the grand exchange to get your hands on a rare, however you can sell your rare very quickly and therefore wont loose profit off your item.

*for more info on camping please refer to the camping section*

 

#2 Trading for items

 

When godwars or barrows items are dropping in price you can trade cash + junk for them and then sell the item for a low price on

the grand exchange. The % rates are anywhere from 50% cash to 90% cash, depending how badly the item is dropping

 

#3 Trading for "stable junk"

 

This is a popular method used by players if they do not have any rares as it stops you from loosing profit on your items. The most common stable junk is broodoo shields, you can buy these for around 40-60% cash + junk. The disadvantage of this method is that it uses up alot of cash.

 

#4 item lending

 

This is a good way of getting rid of small amounts of junk, simply go to the north west section of the grand exchange in world 2 and

lend out your items!

 

 

Making profit with junk

 

 

When items such as armadyl and saradomin godswords, arcane and spectral shields, are min or close to min it can be a way for you to make some quick profits, however this is only reccomended if you have some mini rares stored away or you have cash to hold stable junk until you get rares.

 

This is really quite a straight forward way of gaining a few mil very quickly, you buy however many godswords / shields you want from GE for around min price, and you trade the item for cash + junk therefore gaining you the profit from min - mid, with a 60m item that would be 3m profit per item and if it was godswords that's a very fast 30m profit. The great thing about these items unlike when rares crash in GE is that you get a good cash / junk ratio and should be getting comfortably 80% cash for your items, 10 godswords at 60m each mid price gaining you 30m profit for just 120m or less junk, great if you have some spare rares!

 

 

Camping

 

 

The Grand exchange updates once a day. The average time between updates is 23 hours 16 mins (as of 22nd November 2010). The majority of items update daily, however the discontinued items which you will most probably be "camping" update far less frequently, so you have to use the graphs that are in the grand exchange database to estimate when a item will update. Heres a example,

As you can see the by counting the days between each update, white partyhat is due to update on the next update, this is the update when you will camp the item. Now for the camping part.

 

I'm sure you have heard of many methods, but this method is why i believe to be the fastest manual method out there, yes there are people that use bots to camp items, sad, but lets not go there :).

When you are ready to camp, get the offer for the item you want to camp up on your screen, set the amount you want and start mass clicking the max price button, as soon as the ge updates the max price will change, as fast as you can after that click confirm offer. This is the fastest manual camping method i know of, good luck with getting your rares!

 

[sohkmj1]

My eyes... they burnnnnnnnn!

Less blue font please, and by less I mean all of it. It looks absolutely ugly and unreadable. I got to the part about item limits and then I gave up.

[Shangdi]

Yes please.

 

Blue on blue=ARRRRGH

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haha okie guys sorry :P

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writing up new parts today

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currently working on a video guide