[ Poll ] 500g + 48 days = 1 Million Gold? (Guide)

How did you get here?

From Gaia Guides & Resources		37.8%	[ 149 ]
A friend linked me.		13.7%	[ 54 ]
I searched some key words and found it.		9.1%	[ 36 ]
Redirection from Teh Hoarding Guild.		4.6%	[ 18 ]
Redirection from Solution to a Problem.		2.3%	[ 9 ]
By stalking Jace. (You can't pick this, Sayu.)		7.4%	[ 29 ]
I have no idea how I got here.		25.1%	[ 99 ]

Total Votes: 394

[Jace Quin]

Exchanging vs Vending
(Both are Trumped by Hoarding)

Exchanging vs Vending. Although you might hear people say differently one isn’t really better than the other. They both have pros and cons. Which one you think is better depends on you and your situation. I personally do a combination of both. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.

But when it comes to seriously making gold, nothing is trumped by hoarding. I'm talking here, sheerly of percentage of return on capital. By which, I mean, you spend the least amount of gold to make the most amount of money. It is not for everyone. It requires patience and capital to start out. If you don't have either of those things (or one but not the other) stick to whichever of the above methods you prefer.

[Jace Quin]

Exchanging

The purpose of the Exchange is twofold: You go there to buy cheap items to sell in the marketplace at a profit or you go there to sell or trade away expensive/hard to sell items. There is an unspoken agreement among the frequenters of the Exchange that the sellers expect lower-than-market prices for their items in return for the convenience of bulk-selling and the quick gold of not having to wait. In short you buy from the Exchange to sell in the Marketplace.

First, you need to know where the Exchange forum is. It can be located by going to Gaia Forums and clicking on The Gaia Exchange in the Gaia Gaming section. (Or by following this handy link: Exchange Link.) Now that you’ve found it you need to know where to go from there. There are several sub-forums contained within the main Exchange forum. Basically as long as you are selling some kind of equippable or house item, you can do anything else in the main forum. Buy, sell, sell game items, have contests, etc. If you are not selling (or if you are selling only Game Items) you need to head to the appropriate forum. Because not being in the right place is rude and gets on a lot of people’s nerves. So don’t do it.

Subforums

Explanations of what to do in each sub-forum. You can skip this if you want to.

Lotto/Money Games: This forum is where lotteries and other money games can be held. If
you are an extremely lucky person you might go there to check it out. But I wouldn’t recommend
it. I have never entered that forum but, I suspect, as with many money games they probably
have some way of ripping you off. Especially the lotteries. Most lotteries are “for profit” and can
take years before they’re drawn.

Wanted: This is the place to go to buy things. If you are looking for something for yourself I
suggest listing an offer rather than asking people to name their price because, more than likely,
they’re going to try to get you to pay as much as possible because they know you want the item.
There’s also a way to make money by buying things in the Wanted but I’ll explain that later.

Charity/Quests: The Charity/Quests forum is the forum dedicated to exactly what it sounds
like. If you are on a quest I suggest creating a semi-pretty nicely laid-out quest thread and
bumping it a lot as you will get far more donations than just random begging. On a somewhat
related note, if you have ever been donated to by a charity and you get to have a lot of money,
give back to the Gaia community by donating yourself.

Gaia Marketplace Discussion: This is the place to advertise your shop in the Gaia
Marketplace. I honestly don’t know why you would, or how this would help in anyway. But hey, if
you feel the urge, there’s a forum for it.

Game Item Exchange: This is the place you buy and sell game items. Game items include:
Bugs, other “trash” that can be found in towns, all items obtained from fishing, pinball powerups,
“Electric Love Factory” powerups, credits, tickets, tokens, all zOMG rings, all zOMG recipe
ingredients (but not the recipes themselves or the items created from them.)

The Main Gaia Exchange: Most likely, this will be the place where you are headed to make
money.

Exchanging in the Exchange

Unless it’s eight am (EST, five am PST) on a tuesday morning, any thread on the first page should be just fine for your purposes. (If it does happen to be such a slow time as early morning on a school day you may want to wait until later to avoid becoming frustrated. If you can’t wait for whatever reason then pay attention to the time stamp on the most recent post. If it was more than ten minutes ago, don’t bother.) And by “any thread” I mean, you’re probably not going to head into the one where the title says: “Glaurels, HOTD, Devil Tail, NM Minis” but most of them should be fine. Generally, the post-count doesn’t matter as much as you’d think. A lot of people have perma-threads that get to be extremely large and other people have to bump a lot to keep their thread on the first page.

Once you’ve selected a thread the first thing to do is read the thread owner’s rules (if they have any.) Many rules people will post are common sense. Such as, do not quote anything on the first page (or just the first post itself if it’s not a permanent thread). This causes page-stretching which is just annoying. Even if they don’t have that rule, don’t do it. Many people will ask you not to pm them, although conversely some people only want to be pmed.

My Exchange Rules

If there are no rules posted, or if there are, I have compiled a list of things you should follow. You
may skip this, I suppose, although I would prefer if you did not.

And believe me, I’ve seen at least one person break every rule.
Follow the TOS. Most obvious rule ever. Go read it again just to refresh your memory.
Follow the Exchange rules posted in a stickied thread in the main Exchange.
Use a readable font.
Don’t quote first post/first page posts. Especially if they contain large pictures.
Do not pm the seller unless they give permission in their rules or ask you to.
Look up and know the price of what you’re offering on before you offer.
Never bid more than you have.
Don’t bid on something you don’t intend to buy.
Don’t beg.
Don’t send a trade unless you are told to.
Label all trades as much as possible (there is a HUGE character limit, I promise.)
Be polite.
Offer on items individually. No lump offers for this that and the other thing for 3k.
Try not to use chatspeak. If you’re thoroughly incapable of avoiding it please never come
to my thread I mean... please use only more common chatspeak such as “u”, “2”, or
“brb” instead of expecting the seller to know what “tn34umvsn” means. (To my knowledge that is
not an actual word in 1337, I was just giving a ridiculous example.)
Be patient. Don’t requote your offer every minute or leave after three minutes of no response. I
follow the guide-line of re-posting my offer after a few minutes if and only if the seller has
already responded to someone who posted after me and leave the thread if the seller has not
posted at all in ten minutes. Before I leave I requote my offer with the further message asking if
they can pm me or send a trade later if they like any of my offers and that I don’t want to wait
longer than ten minutes.

The next thing to do after reading a seller’s rules is to look over their items and see if there is something or multiple items you want to buy. Sometimes people post pictures of what they’re selling, sometimes they have lists, sometimes they put items in the “show inventory” box or equip everything they want to sell. But anyway, try to figure out everything you want to buy (within your price range) before posting. Also before posting: Check and see that the items you want to buy aren’t already sold. Then post the item name and your offer. Offer individually for each item. Make sure you have enough for what you want to buy and hopefully a little more for wiggle room in case the seller wants to haggle.

How do you offer, you wonder? Because, I know, it seems bizarre to buy things to earn gold. But, that’s how it works. You’re going to want to offer less than what you think you can sell it for in the marketplace. There are a few different things to consider when offering on something. You need to keep in mind the two percent tax. You need to pay attention to both the Average Buy Price and the Lowest Buy Now Price as well at the little red or green percentage next to the average buy price. A small green number (five or less) is good. A huge green or red number (+/-10% or more) is bad, I’d avoid buying it. A small red number is okay you just may want to offer a little lower on that item. When offering always make offers off whichever price is lower, LMP (Lowest Market Price/Lowest Buy Now Price) or average buy price.

Rule of thumb for offering. If the item is worth less than 1.5k offer 100-400g off the MP (Market Price). Most people will accept that. For items 2-4k offer 500-700g off. 4-11k offer 1k off. 11-30k offer 2k off. 30-70k 3-4k off. 70-90k offer 3-5k off. 90-120k offer 10k off. For items over these amounts (or just in general if you’re the calculations type, it’s usually safe to offer 80-90% of the price. Not off, but of the price, which is 10-20% off. As you become more experienced it becomes easier to offer on items and to know which items to offer a little more or a little less on.

If the seller accepts your offer send them a labeled trade with the correct amount of gold (or items if you’re trading). Once the trade is complete you’re all set to start earning money from your investments.

Okay! So you have now bought a few items. You want to list your items so that they sell quickly in the MP and you can re-invest your gold (especially if you have very little). This is why it’s important to offer off the LMP if it’s lower than the Average buy price. So that you can sell right away and still profit. List your items for less than the current lowest price (even if only 1g lower). If you have a little more gold or a little more patience you can make more profit by listing your item a little higher, especially if you plan to leave it overnight when the supply is lower and the demand tends to remain the same.

Ideally you will have ten different items selling in your shop at the same time while you search for or wait on more deals. That is where you want to be to make the most profit. But having items sit in your shop (or your inventory, waiting for a slot in your shop) for days at a time is no good. You need to price to sell relatively quickly so that you can move on and re-invest.



Wanted Exchanging

Exchanging through the Wanted subforum is a lot like owning a pawn shop. You typically want to have at least 100k before trying this. People will come to you and offer you items to buy from them. They do this because they’re too impatient to sell in the marketplace. They want gold and they want it now, not in an hour. You profit through patience. You offer on their items much like you would to a seller in the regular Exchange, if they agree to sell you do a trade and then you list the item in the Marketplace just like you would with any item you bought from someone. Often, you can offer even lower than you would usually in the regular Exchange because the sellers are just so impatient and eager for your pure. It depends on your strategy in the Wanted. If you give better offers you’ll likely get a higher volume of items. But if you offer lower you might buy fewer items but have a higher profit margin. Whatever works for you.



Game Item Exchanging

Buying game items for cheap in the Exchange at inventory sales and such and then selling them to collectors in the Game Exchange or turning bugs into ink, etc. is a decent way to make profit. The highest profit game items to buy are black, green, red, & blue bugs, black, blue, green, red & white ink, and tickets. Bugs can typically be bought for 1 gold each while the inks (made from fifty bugs) can be considerably more than that. Particularly black and white ink. White ink can be made from five of each red, blue and green inks (250 bugs of each color) so you spent 750g on it and you can sell it for up to 2k per bottle due to the high demand for white body dyes. Tickets should be bought for about .5g each less than the average buy price per unit for tickets. The best way to sell them is to turn them into the best selling prize and joy items. To know what these are you must do research. The same goes if you’re going to turn your cheap ink into tattoos. The goal here is to always make the most profit from your investment.

[Jace Quin]

Vending



The first thing you need to know about vending is that I have a much looser definition of the term than a lot of people you might find. I tend to use it broadly, referring to using the Marketplace in general to earn gold as opposed to just using it in the “traditional” way of snatching up low and mis-priced items. I have come up with several different techniques of using the marketplace to earn gold, not all of which require the fastest connection out there. But first we’ll start with the traditional.

Latest Listing

This is one of the more traditional methods. You refresh the page that shows the most recently
added items and look for mis-priced or low-priced items that you can buy to re-sell. You can get
to this page by going to the main page of the marketplace scroll down to “auctions ending now”
and click “view all.” From there go to the drop-down menu at the top right of the listings and pick
just added. This will take you to the page of the most recently added items. (You can also get to
this page by using the handy link I have provided here.) Just refresh to see new items.

This method requires a great deal of knowledge about all of Gaia’s items because you’re being
shown items indiscriminately. Some items are easy to tell if it’s a good deal. Game items are
very easy to pick up this way. Other items are a little harder. It helps if you’ve been around in the
Exchange for a while, buying and selling a variety of items.

This method also requires speed and being able to think on the fly. If I spot a deal I usually click
on the item name, not the listing, to check and see if it’s really a deal before I buy it. Taking my
time to decide this sometimes means other people end up buying the item before I can. But I
prefer to play it safe. I’d much rather buy something I know is a deal twenty percent of the time
than snatch up something I think is a deal half the time only to discover that sometimes, it’s not.
Because really, no matter how familiar you are with the items, you might be wrong.

Game Sub-version of Latest Listing Method

You do what you do in the above explanation of the latest listing method except you only look for
deals on game items. Snatching up bunches of flowers or trash for .01 gold each and selling
them for .33g each to the crazy people in the game exchange who collect them isn’t a fast way
to earn gold but it is a sure bet. You can also find low-priced tin cans and paper bags and
do the same thing. A huge majority of Gaia sees game items as nothing but a nuisance and will
throw hundred of items into the vend for 1g for everything just to get rid of it. Finding cheap bugs
(particularly the ones used to make black, blue, green and red ink) in the vend and making ink
out of them to sell can also be profitable, or moving up a step in production to tattoos (be sure to
research tattoo prices first to make sure you’re making the most profit for your ink) is good.

Multi-tab:

The multi-tab version of Vending involves taking a much more focused approach and
concentrating on half a dozen items that you are going to vend. What you are going to do is
open multiple tabs all opened to the marketplace showing different listings. I will admit I have
never tried this method, I have no attention span and it’s just not for me. I do know a bit about
how it works. You choose items to concentrate on by certain criteria. I deduce, using my vast
intellect, that the criteria are: the supply of the item (how many listings it has and how often new
listings are added), the demand for the item (how much and how often do people buy it?), that
the item has a relatively stable price, and you have enough gold to buy several of the various
items you are vending. Unfortunately, choosing the items involves research. Once you’ve picked
your items you refresh the listings in a cascade and check to see if there are any low priced
ones for you to buy. To me, this seems ridiculously boring. But this is a good method to use if
you’re not familiar with a ton of items.

“Sniping”:

I actually did not know there was a commonly used name for this method until very recently
when I saw a couple of Exchangers discussing a recent change to the market-place that adds
one minute to the duration of an auction if a user bids in the last minute. I always called it “End
auction vending” just because I like the way it sounds when you say it. It has nice assonance
and consonance. But now that the totally unnecessary digression is over I’ll explain. “Sniping”
involves searching the auctions that are almost over and looking for ones where the bids are still
very low, jumping in and bidding at the last minute and winning the cheap item.

You can find the auctions expiring now by going to the main page and scrolling down to
“auctions expiring now” and clicking on the “view all” link. (Or you can just click
here because it’s easier.) I usually go to the second page of auctions, which will show
auctions with 1-2 minutes left. Choosing items for this is fairly easy. Since you have a couple
minutes to think about it. Check on the listing of a likely-looking item to see that you’d be getting
a deal before bidding.

Some auctions have a bid increment so you want to make sure you bid enough to go over the
bid increment or you’ll get an error. Another thing about bid increments is that they don't apply to
the starting bid. Often you can start the bidding for just 1g but the bid increment will make the
listing undesirable for anyone else to bid on. The two biggest problem with this method are the
one I mentioned briefly before about the fact that one minute is automatically added to the
auction duration if someone bids in the last minute, giving other people time to out-bid you. The
other problem is the bidding wars you have with other people trying to get the item for cheap. It’s
very frustrating in my humble opinion. I don’t use this method often anymore although it’s good
for slow Gaia-times such as early-morning if you have a slow connection but still want to try to
earn some gold.

Letter Opening

I suppose that this isn’t technically what most people would call a vending technique but it uses
the marketplace and doesn’t fit in any other category. This method involves finding instances
where the items that come out of a letter are worth significantly more than the letter, buying the
letter and opening it up to receive the item, then selling the item. This method can also be used
for bundles of "magic boxes" and other bundles. They're not letters, but the principle is the
same. Find an instance where the contents are worth more than the package, buy, unpack,
resell the contents.

The two things about this method are: as the majority of MCs are typically worth in the 15-100k
range (although there are obvious exceptions) you have to have a decent amount of gold to do
this, just as you would to otherwise vend with or Exchange with MCs. The second is that it
requires a lot of research using the Marketplace and Tek-tek.

First thing to do is look up “letter” in the market place. Have it sort by price, with the lowest price
at the top. This way you have an easy list of the Letters in your price range. Then open up a
new tab or window and go to tektek.org (Tek-tek is a website exclusively containing Gaia tools
and resources). From the main page of Tek-tek you’ll want to go to Gaia Items (located top
center) and then use the search bar at the top right to look up the first letter. Once you’ve hit
enter and the page comes up off on the left it will have “related items” which are always, the
currently available sealed letter, and then the two or three items contained in the letter you
looked up. If one or more of the items is worth more than the letter (according to the prices listed
right there on the tek-tek page) you should write down the letter and item name(s) so you can
look them up in the Market place as tek-tek prices aren’t reliable. Once you have a list of likely
letters in your price range you have to go through and see if any of the letters are cheaper than
what’s inside them by looking up the prices of both in the Marketplace. If so, buy them up, open
them, and sell the items.

It’s research and labor-intensive but happens more often than you might imagine and the
method doesn’t rely as heavily on there being a large number of people on Gaia at the time. It’s
a good way to profit in my opinion.

[Jace Quin]

Hoarding

The first thing you have to know about hoarding is that there are two things that are a requirement to do it. One is patience. The other is gold. If you don't have either or one but not the other then this section is not for you. This is an instance where you really have to have a good chunk of gold to make even more gold. Teh Hoarding Guild, of which I am a member and by no means am I intending here to poach information I just wanted to share a viewpoint of someone qualified, says you need at least 400k to hoard. I think it depends more on what and for how long you are hoarding. If you're only hoarding some cheap items for a month you can probably do it with less gold but that kind of instance really only occurs before Halloween and Christmas. If you aren't in for a really long-term goal like a D-tail, Minis or *winces* a Halo, you probably don't want to hoard for years. I can't say as I want to either. So my methods focus more on hoarding for certain times of year than hoarding for years. Okay? Okay.

The best things to hoard for anyone as they are both cheap and easy to profit from are are Halloween, Christmas and Wintery items because they're at their cheapest prices and they go up the most because the market swings up at Halloween and Christmas. I suggest buying at inventory sales or keeping an eye out in the vend for mis-priced or low priced event items (I notice that people list event items very low often times just to get rid of them swiftly.)

You can also hoard RIGs and EIs. What do I recommend for hoarding for RIGs? Whatever is in the cash shop as of right this moment. However, if it's been out for less than a week you'll want to wait a week before buying. Just buy a bunch, wait a month or two and then sell. You can make 20k on each one pretty much guaranteed without doing anything. Seriously. You can also hoard EIs but they require more research. You need to know who the artist is, whether the item seem popular or has a popular theme and what the price in Cash is. If the Price in cash is ten dollars and you have enough to buy some first or second generation ones when they've just come out you'll want to do so. For a seven-fifty EI you'll want to wait until the second generation comes out (to see if it looks good) and find out who the artist is (the work of some artists is much more popular than others) and see if the GCD if going crazy over the item. If all those things are looking goof I say buy some. You'll only want to wait four to six evolutions before selling. Sell when you like the profit. If the third evolution is amazing and the price shoots up 300k SELL, SELL, SELL. You don't want to wait. More than likely if you do you'll end up settling for less profit when you could have earned more, moved on and re-invested by then.

I suggest not buying more than fifty of any one MC to hoard or more than twenty-five or any one event item. You have to be aware of what you are capable of getting rid of in a time period or without affecting the market price. Try to avoid "dumping" your hoard. Take you time selling, go slowly and get the best prices. It might take a couple weeks to sell it off but after you've already waited however long it will be worth it.

More specific suggestions for shorter term. Hoard Halloween items from September to Mid-October. Start selling as soon as the event opens. Christmas items may be bought from Mid-October through November. Start selling when the event opens. Those are the best event-related hoards but obviously I'm not saying you shouldn't pick up a few Valentines or Easter things for those holidays as well. Evolving items. I suggest hoarding five to ten (not more) second-generation (because they're cheaper) EIs of eight-to-ten dollar EIs for four or five generations and then selling. A sure profit instead of a maybe-better profit is something you should go for.

For more information on hoarding check out my other guide: The Solution to a Problem; A Guide to Hoarding

[Jace Quin]