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Remember when I was sorting through the items left over from my mission-running days? It turns out that selling items is substantially more complicated than just pressing “sell” on each item. The fundamental tradeoff is between how badly you want to get an optimum price for each item and how much time you want to spend on it.

The core problem is that for every trade, there has to be another person on the other side. Unlike a world like World of Warcraft, there are no NPC (ie computer controlled) venders that will pay standard rates for items you don’t want.

The main mechanism for finding people to make a trade with is the Market Browser. Lets find an item that I want to sell. For instance, the best item I had in this haul was this Internal Force Field Array. Here’s what the market for that item in my region looks like.

There are two types of orders on the market. In the top pane, we have people who also have this item and are looking to sell their items for the listed price. We’ll call these people sellers. In this scenario, I’m a seller.

On the bottom we have people who would like to buy this item for some specified price. These prices are always lower than the sellers prices. This makes sense – if the buyers were willing to pay the sellers prices, they would just buy from them directly.

The difference in price between the highest buy order and the lowest sell order is known as arbitrage, and it’s where lots of so-called “Station Traders” make their money. You find items that have a nice big gap between the buy and sell prices, put up a buy order, and hope to find someone who will sell you the item. Then you turn around and sell the item back to someone else at the prevailing (higher) sell prices.

In the example item above, current selling prices at this station seems to be 10.41M, but the highest buy price is 9.8M. That’s a decent margin – enough to be worth placing a sell order on it. Luckily there’s quite a bit of demand for this particular item, and it sold pretty much instantly.

So why does anyone ever sell their items to these buyers for less than than the prevailing market value? It’s all about time. Buyers are willing to give you money right now for your item. No waiting. You hit sell, and the money is in your wallet. Sell orders, on the other hand, mean that you have to wait for someone else to come along and pay you for the item. You also have to hope that someone else doesn’t come along and try to sell another copy of your item for less than you’re selling it for. How long you have to wait is more or less a function of the volume of trades on that item. High volume items turn over quickly, so you probably won’t have to wait long for yours to sell.

Station traders get paid because they’re willing to wait. You sell them your item for somewhat under its fair price to not have to spend time babysitting it and making sure it’s well priced as the market values adjust around you.

Every station in EVE has its own market. This means there are many thousands of places to sell your item at. Unsurprisingly, prices vary substantially across the galaxy. In general, the more remote (ie towards low-sec and 0.0) you go, the higher the prices and the lower the volume. So if you’re like me, and you’re looking to offload lots of items as quickly as possible and for the best prices, you want to go someplace that has low arbitrage and high trading volumes. That place is Jita.

The Caldari Navy station at Planet 4, Moon 4 in the Jita system is the biggest trading hub in EVE. It’s the NYSE, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and Walmart all rolled into one. When people talk about going shopping in EVE, Jita is usually their destination. There are rarely fewer than 300 people in the system, and 1000 people is not uncommon during peak times. Something like 8% of all market activity in the galaxy happens on this station.

So when I show up in Jita with a hauler’s worth of mission loot to sell, I have to make a decision for each item in my hold. Do I sell it directly to another buyer for instant cash, or do I place my own buy order and wait for someone else to come pay me? To do this, I check the arbitrage rates. If I’m losing less than ~250k ISK by selling it immediately, I’ll do it. It’s not worth my time to squeeze that extra ISK out of it. But if the sell orders are substantially higher than the buy orders, I’ll place a sell order and wait. In Jita, I didn’t have to wait long – all my sell orders were fulfilled within a few hours, and I was flush with cash.

In the end, I probably could have squeezed out another 5-10M out of these items if I’d dutifully placed sell orders on every single one and waited them out. But instead, I effectively indirectly paid a commission to some faceless trader to do the selling for me so I could finish my trading quickly.

Starting Cash: 384M

Ending Cash: 487M