ESO trading guide - how to flip items for profit

Every stonk is a stonk

Introduction

Trading in ESO can seem daunting at first, so this guide is meant to help you get started or maybe learn a thing or two if you already have some experience. We will go over some addons that will aid you in your journey to becoming rich, as well as how to actually use these in practice. Finally, there is a segment on how to price your items so you can get the right amount of money for your wares.

Required Addons

The following addons are required when trading.

For a complete list of recommended addons for ESO, check out our addon guide here.

Tamriel Trade Center (TTC)

Download: https://www.esoui.com/downloads/info1245-TamrielTradeCentre.html

Or use Minion   ->   (how to set up Minion)

When installing addons, don’t forget to check for required libraries!

This one can be a bit tricky to set up, you have to run the client.exe file in the folder \Elder Scrolls Online\live\AddOns\TamrielTradeCentre\Client for it to work. I recommend having the client run on your pc startup so you always have up to date prices.

What this addon does is give you a range of prices for each item to give you an idea of its value.

It also has sales data from across the whole server - not just the guilds you are in, but you cannot see how these are distributed since it’s just an average. For pricing that works with the guilds you are in (they can be quite dependent on the location of your trader) and a nice graph, you can use Master Merchant.

Settings

Master Merchant (MM)

Download: https://www.esoui.com/downloads/info2753-MasterMerchant3.0.html

This addon is essential to see fluctuations in the value of items. It does require you to be in a few good trading guilds for it to get data though. It also shows sales data, but unlike TTC it is just for your own guilds and it also shows a graph with actual sales over time instead of just an average. It also makes it easier to limit your sales data to a certain time period by pressing some keybind while you are checking prices in game.

An alternative to this addon is Arkasius Trade Tools, which is more lightweight but not as thorough. I will not be covering ATT in this guide as I have no experience with it.

Settings

These are the MM settings I use for the first flipping method listed below. Feel free to adapt them to your needs, this is just a base to start from.

How to use the MM screen 

When opening your mail you will see the following button:

The main one you’ll be using is the ‘trophy’ tab at the top, where you can see how much you’ve sold in that trading week (keep in mind this starts and ends on Tuesday when the traders swap).

This makes it very easy to see if you have reached the weekly quota in your guilds for that week.

You can play around with the other tabs as well, see other guildies’ sales, search for items or specific players, see your purchases, et cetera.

Also don’t forget to click the lock icon so you can move the window around to your liking.

Loading sales data

When you first install MM or just joined a guild, it won’t have any data yet.

You can load up to 10 days back so you can get started with flipping right away! Here’s how to do it:

Open the guild history tab, then go to Sales.

You will then see ‘E - show more’ at the bottom. Basically you spam E until this disappears if it’s your first time loading data with this guild, and then press the spinny wheel next to Sales on the libHistoire tab on the left.

If it’s not your first time loading data from this guild, you can just press E until the bar in libHistoire turns yellow and it’ll sort itself out from there.

Always remember, more guilds is more data, so if you are able to, fill your guild slots with guilds that provide you with knowledge!

Awesome Guild Store

Download: https://www.esoui.com/downloads/info695-AwesomeGuildStore.html

This one is absolutely required, even if you are not a trader. It gives the guild store UI a lot of extra filters and features. As a trader, it works together with Master Merchant and TTC to give you options for profit filters and more.

Settings

Pricing your items

Price checks

Being able to do a proper price check is the most important skill to have for any trader.

There are a few things to keep in mind, the first being the rarity of the item. 

If there are only a few listings of an item, it’s best to go on the TTC website, either by manually going there or by clicking the ‘Search Online’ option that pops up when right clicking an item in game. From there, you can sort by price. As you can see in this example, the prices can vary a lot so you can list it at like 80k if you wanted to even if the lowest is only 13k. Here it is also important to note when the item was last seen by TTC. If the time is many hours ago the chances are high that the item is already sold.

For more commonly sold materials for example, the best pricing can be found by using MM and then looking at sales data from the past 3 days. If you have the same settings as shown above, you can do this by holding ctrl when hovering over the item. To see individual sales in this timeframe, pop up the item data first, either by clicking on the item, or by choosing ‘pop up item data’ from the right-click menu. Then hover over the individual sales points to get more info on the sale.

Of course, this all depends on how fast you want the item to sell. If you want a quicker sale you can go on the lower end, but if you don’t mind waiting a bit, starting off your pricing a bit higher will get you more gold in the end!

If something doesn’t sell, try relisting it at a different guild or for a slightly lower price. I will personally relist something if it’s been on the trader for 14 or more days, or earlier if it’s an item that’s rapidly dropping in price that I have to get rid of asap.

As a general rule, always check MM before TTC. TTC gives you a very broad range and you are way more likely to over- or underprice your listings by basing your prices off of this. The only time TTC is a viable option is when there are only a few listings as mentioned above, or if you don’t have MM data (for example if you don’t have good trading guilds). In this case I just recommend checking with guildies that do have access to MM data.

If you are still unsure of how to price your item, don’t hesitate to ask guildies! We’ll gladly help you out in our trading channel in discord or in-game chat if online.

In the end, it’s a process of trial and error and you get better at it over time.

Calculating profit

As a reseller, it is very important to know how profit is calculated to make sure you are not selling at a loss.

First, 3,5% of the total selling price goes to the trading guild it was sold in as tax.
Secondly, 3,5% goes into the ZOS void as a sort of gold sink. (meaning this amount disappears from the game entirely)

Lastly, there is a listing fee of 1%.

As a result, we need to sell an item for more than 8% higher than what we bought it for in order to make a profit.

If we get into the math of this, you can calculate your profit on an item with the following formula:

Profit = [Selling Price] * 0,92 (Taxes + Listing Fee) - [Purchase Price]

For example, If we buy an item for 200k and sell it for 300k:

300 000 * 0,92 - 200 000 = 76 000
In this case we made 76k gold!

Trading guilds and weekly quotas

Many of the good trading guilds will have a weekly quota as a means to pay their trader bids and to keep the guild afloat. These quotas can seem scary at first, but they are very easy to achieve as a reseller. Most will also have an option to just donate a small fee if you can’t reach the quota that week, or pay in advance if you know you’ll be away from the game for a bit.
If the guild is managed well, the weekly quota will be representative of how well things sell in that particular guild, because it is a number that is achieved weekly by almost all of its members. So, a quota may be high but in that case it will also be easier to get to that sales number.

How to reach quota as a reseller

If you keep in mind the calculation for profit in ESO, you need at least 8% of margin on an item you buy to not lose money on it. So, what you can do is buy the quota’s worth in fast-selling crafting mats, that are listed for at least 8% lower than market price, and then list them for market price. This way you essentially lose 0 gold while also providing your trading guild with their required tax!

How trading bids work

To better understand why top tier trading guilds require lots of taxes and donations from their members, let’s have a look at how a guild can obtain a trader to sell their wares at.

The trader bids are blind, meaning you cannot see what the other guilds bid for a particular spot. Each guild gets 10 bids to place in total. Your highest bid gets priority, so the game will then check if any other guild bid higher than this amount. If this bid is lost, the next highest one is checked and so on.

These bids are weekly and top tier spots go for many tens of millions. Unfortunately the tax is never enough to cover this cost (for example if someone sells something for 100k the guild only gets 3,5k) and all trading guilds rely on donations from generous members, raffles and other income.

Joining trading guilds

When I got started with flipping I joined a few low quota guilds to get the hang of it and kinda moved up from there, seeing how easy it was to meet the quota I knew I could move up to the better locations. Remember, the quota is a good indication of how well things sell in this location/guild.

The best trading locations are usually Vivec, Belkarth and the alliance capitals (Grahtwood, Mournhold, Stormhaven)

Try to avoid guilds on outlaws refuges or lone traders in the middle of nowhere, you might like not having to worry about quota but you also won’t be making much gold there so you’re not really saving any gold in the end.

My personal recommendations for trading guilds are North Watch Order and the Valinor guilds. Of course I have not been in every single trading guild so there are many good ones out there!

Reselling items

There are many ways you can go about this and the key here is to find something that works for you. I will explain 2 slightly different flipping methods here.

Flipping method 1: TTC pricing

This is the main method I use and the most satisfying in my opinion. For this we need the addons as set up in the addons section.

I set up my profit filters as follows:

• Sort by time left: make sure the newest listings are shown first. If it’s a good deal it’ll be listed recently.

• Profit range: I’ll consider 3000k and up for it to be worth a trading slot. If you are starting out you can lower this a bit.

• Deal range: with this it’ll only show items with at least 15% profit. (meaning 7% actual profit after selling at the very least)

Once this is set up, you basically just run up to guild traders in random zones and scan through their wares until you find something worthwhile.

This method can require a bit of game and pricing knowledge but don’t be discouraged! When starting you can go for some safer flips that you know will sell for sure, and take a bit more risk later on. It’s also a myth that you need a huge starting capital to do this, you can go flipping with as little as 10k and go a bit higher every time as this 10k will soon turn into 50k and more! Your first million will always be the hardest, it’s pretty smooth sailing from there as you can start flipping bigger items.

Always check on your MM data if the item you are buying has any sales and what price it has there.

Flipping method 2: MM pricing, crafting materials

This is a method that was taught to me by the owner of a Vivec trading guild (shoutout to Lea from the Valinor guilds, though she will probably never read this or even know who I am), after trying it out for a bit I decided it’s not for me, but it may well be for some of you so I will include it here. It is also much easier to start with when you don’t really know yet what sells or not because it’s a lot harder to go wrong with flipping mats. If you’re a beginner, I can recommend starting out with flipping alchemy materials just to get the hang of it.

We need to change a few settings from our regular MM setup for this to work:

You absolutely need reliable MM data for this one otherwise you’ll be missing out on a lot of flips so in that case method 1 would be better suited for you.

Now, we can create several tabs like this. It’s best to have one for each type of material, so one for blacksmithing, one for alchemy etc so it’s easier to specify the filter. 

In the text box here you can see you can remove items you don’t want to see by typing - and then the item. In this case I don’t want to buy purified water so I type -purified. Be careful with this filter though because sometimes you can accidentally filter out items you did want to see (-water will remove water hyacinth as well as purified water and everything else with water in it)

Here’s the full list of allowed operators in case you want to go really in depth with this:

' ' (space), '&': combine two words with AND

'+', "/": combine two words with OR

'-', '^', '!': negate expression

'~', '*': soft match item link (only item id instead of all fields)

'(', ')': control the order in which operators are evaluated

'"': filter for an exact term, handling operators in between two double quotes as part of a term

When the filter is done, you can essentially buy everything that’s showing as more than 8%, and make a profit. Do keep in mind prices fluctuate so going for the higher percentages is safer.

With this method you usually won’t find crazy flips like in the first one but you will have a pretty steady income of smaller profits so it’s a bit more reliable, but not as satisfying to me.

Farming items to sell

Farming is a good way to start building up some capital for yourself, though it requires a bit more grinding usually. I won’t include every single thing you can farm here, but rather give you a few ideas on things you can look into. (note: I don’t farm for items to sell myself, I find it very boring and would much rather go shopping for flips)

There are several good guides for this on the internet, check out Arttea’s youtube channel for example.

Farmable items that sell well

• Perfect roe from fishing

• Gold upgrade mats (do your daily writs! Get your deconstruction CP node!)

• Alchemy ingredients used for endgame potions

• All kinds of motifs (vet dungeons/zone dailies/antiquities)

• Rare furniture plans -> stealing

• …

Making profit from PvP

Here’s a list of valuable items you can buy with the currencies you make from PvP

AP:

• Deadly Strike coffers (especially the daggers)

• ‘Unidentified Elite Weapon’ from the elite vendor in your alliance base - can drop juicy Vicious Death lightning staves etc.

• Dark Convergence coffers

• …

Tel Var:

• Hakeijo

• Powerful Assault coffers (2-4 mil gold for an ice staff)

• Waxed Apothecary Parcel

• …

Keeping up with the economy

This one’s a little more advanced but it can really help you in your trading game. Keeping up with the economy involves reading patch notes, thinking about how upcoming events will affect sales etc. 

For example, during the Elsweyr event a lot of the Elsweyr motifs are dropping and the market gets absolutely flooded with them, causing them to drastically lower in price. This would not be a good time to sell these motifs, but you can buy some for cheap and hoard them until the price increases again (this is usually an endeavor of months so only do this if you have the free bank space and patience)

A second example is the ESO+ trial when everyone is filling their craft bags and materials sell like crazy as a result.

I always try to post things like this in our trading channel if I remember so keep an eye out for that as well.

Assorted random trading tips

• If there are only 5 listings of a certain motif/item you can create a monopoly by buying them all and listing them at whatever price you want. You’ll have to check TTC daily and buy all the listings lower than yours for it to work but can be very worthwhile.

• If you feel you can’t stop buying things to sell, go out with a limited budget and leave the rest in your bank.

houses you can buy and sell the furniture it comes with for profit (prices may not be up to date):

• Kragenhome for 69,000g gives Dark Elf Bed of Coals worth over 300,000g.

• Autumn’s Gate for 60,000g gives Firelogs, Flaming worth ~300,000g.

• Cliffshade for 255,000g gives both Firelogs, Flaming and Firelogs, Charred worth ~500,000g total.

• Ald Velothi Harbor House for 322,000g gives a Shed, Well, Sillar Stone items, and more worth at least double.

Conclusion

I hope you learned something from this, and may you find many stonks!

We always love to see your flips in our trading channel!

If you still have questions or there’s something I forgot to mention don’t hesitate to let me know.