I mean for common items and such. I understand that there are more and more of every item and that SP loses value with time, but the prices seem to go down too rapidly, and that for pretty much any non-limited item. Every few days when I price update my shop (which is super tedious and takes ages with out GA) I need to lower price of every item by 200-50000 to be the lowest seller. It makes me wonder how items didn't reach 0 value yet.

I remember a few years ago, prices went up and down (even if down long term) so things in shop would eventually sell. Now I need to price update 300-400 items, only to sell around 10 before prices become "too high" to sell, which takes about a day, after which NOTHING will sell until I update again.

Does anyone have similar experience? (I'm not looking for advice or anything, it's just an observation)

The only time I even see the common items go up is: If there is a new use for them like an achievement or genetech combo, if the recycle beast asks for that item or if the item retires.

Usually when item prices get too low, someone buys them up to fragmentize. Also they can go up in value if the recycle beast asks for them. Or if they become important to whatever is going on on Subeta at the moment. (For example weapons gain some value when Maleria is the weekend quest, books gained value during the reading drives, items needed for achievements often increase in value temporarily, ect.) Mundane, really common, and common items were never meant to have lots of value. They are easily restocked from the main shops (because they restock the most often) and so aren't usually worth a lot of sp.

If you dont have a GA, you dont really need to update prices everyday if you have a big shop, maybe every few days.

After doing extensive analysis on 7,327 items of shop restocking items...

738 or 10.07% of items make a profit at the 1-10 percentile margin, at 275sP in revenue or less (negative profit). 729 or 9.95% of items make a profit at the 10-19 percentile margin, between 275 to 460sP in revenue. (negative profit). 731 or 9.98% of items make a profit at the 20-29 percentile margin, between 460 to 747sP in revenue. (negative profit). 841 or 11.48% of items make a profit at the 30-39 percentile margin, between 747 to 1,000 sP in revenue. (usually negative profit). 642 or 8.76% of items make a profit at the 40-49 percentile margin, between 1,000 to 1,990sP in revenue. (sometimes negative profit). The median price of such items were around 1,990 sP. 714 or 9.74% of items make a profit at the 50-59 percentile margin, between 1,990 and 2,799sP in revenue. (little net profit) 732 or 9.99% of items make a profit at the 60-69 percentile margin, between 2,799 and 3,978sP in revenue. (little profit) 752 or 10.26% of items make a profit at the 70-79 percentile margin, between 3,978 and 6,000sP in revenue. (mild profit) 727 or 9.92% of items make a profit at the 80-89 percentile margin, between 6,000 and 12,000sP in revenue. (moderate profit) 353 or 4.82% of items make a profit at the 90-94.9 percentile margin, between 12,000 and 22,499sP in revenue. (decent profit) 292 or 3.99% of items make a profit at the 94.9-98.9 percentile margin, between 22,499 and 54,642sP in revenue. (good profit) 37 or 0.50% of items make a profit at the 99.0 to 99.5 percentile margin, between 54,642 and 89,968sP in revenue. (excellent profit) 29 or 0.40% of items make a profit at the 99.5 to 99.9 percentile margin, between 89,968sP and 240,139sP in revenue. (incredible profit) 8 or 0.11% of items make a profit exceeding the 99.9 percentile margin, of 240,139 sP to a few million sP in revenue. (extraordinary profit)

The revenue of the sample size market is 45,279,896sP without price-cutting as of 3 weeks ago for a restocking cycle of 2 days. There are probably 11,000 items for restocking but at any point in a given time typically 3,500 to 5,800 or so are shown in all shops, and less so if there are no items available for restocking.

The net worth for items priced at the 0-9.99% percentile is 202,950sP. (0.44% of total market worth) The net worth for items priced at the 10-19.99% percentile is 267,907sP. (0.60% of total market worth) The net worth for items priced at the 20-29.99% percentile is 441,231sP. (0.90% of total market worth) The net worth for items priced at the 30-39.99% percentile is 734,697sP. (1.62% of total market worth) The net worth for items priced at the 40-49.99% percentile is 959,790sP. (2.12% of total market worth) The net worth for items priced at the 50-59.99% percentile is 1,709,815sP. (3.78% of total market worth) The net worth for items priced at the 60-69.99% percentile is 2,480,674sP. (5.48% of total market worth) The net worth for items priced at the 70-79.99% percentile is 3,751,878sP. (8.29% of total market worth) The net worth for items priced at the 80-89.99% percentile is 6,543,300sP. (14.4% of total market worth) The net worth for items priced at the 90-94.99% percentile is 6,089,214sP. (13.4% of total market worth) The net worth for items priced at the 95-98.99% percentile is 11,262,732sP. (24.9% of total market worth) The net worth for items priced at the 99.00-99.50% percentile is 2,675,288sP. (5.90% of total market worth) The net worth for items priced at the 99.50%-99.90% percentile is 5,743,867sP. (12.7% of total market worth) The net worth for items priced at the 99.900%-99.95% percentile is 4,800,000sP. (10.6% of total market worth)

What can one conclude from this data? There is little to no point in restocking 80% of items shown in shops where revenue is 6,000 sP or less and profit is 6,000 sP - (cost of item ~ 2.4k + downpricing).

The proportion of items worth above 22,499 sP to items underneath is roughly 1 to 20 for average shops. The probability of items being shown worth above 22,499 sP is fairly higher for some shops vs certain other shops like bookstore vs balloon shop. With that knowledge in mind, it should come to no surprise that restocking 20-40 items worth 50k+ with quantity of each item being 2 or less, or restocking 125 items of the 292 unique items being worth more than 22,499 sP is a much more viable strategy than expending considerable effort buying 500 to 2,000 items that yield a profit of 4,000 or less.

Nearly all items are sold when expected profit is higher than a certain threshold, notably 0, and particularly during questing.

Thus the value of the item is closely related with the supply and demand of that item which is closely related with the questing item frequency request of that item. Any time I see an item spike above 80,000, it is usually due to an event like book drive or the SubetaTeam buying up all the items or someone hogging a stash of 100+ items but is a rare occurrence in about once per 8 months. The only other possibility is that it is a clothing item that people refuse to undersell, like Subeautique items or specialty items unless someone is going for a liquidity sale to rack up as much sP as possible. The last possibility is that it is in need due to Saggitarus' quests or the item is first introduced where people have a monopoly over prices, but the number of buyers at that price is closer to 0, and thus begins the spiral downpricing of such items.

Items will continue to depreciate even if restockers no longer buy the items from shops, because there is a continual supply from quests and other means that generate these items that have no item sink to go like for points, etc as you noted.

Therefore it is probably more time-efficient to do your quests, and if time permits, refresh a few times here and there for shops at low-site activity times for items that rarely appear and as such are probably worth in excess of 200k. If you're an avid restocker, and have near-perfect knowledge of which items are worth more than 30k or so, a good 2 hours or so of restocking can yield a considerable revenue of 2-2.5m/day. To capitalize on this however, you must reprice around 4-6 times a day (early morning, late morning, afternoon, early evening and late evening). Around 5% of the items in your shop are outpriced by a competitor every hour, and especially more if the frequency of the item appearing is higher. So you want to aim for slightly rare items with decent prices, where its unlikely that for any given person in that item market to price more often than twice per hour, given that at least 2 new competitors but no more than 5-6 are likely to appear per day.

Hoarders can capitalize on opportunities only when the item sink rate is larger than the item supply rate at some particular instance in time, which is a really unreliable method of making sP, with the exception of rare specialty clothing apparel that will never be re-supplied again and looks moderately decent with other sets of clothing accessories.

Therefore, for more variety in cycling pricing as OP requests, Subeta should aim to offer more item sinks to different classes of items for perks or some other incentives, other than sP since it devaluates its worth. But this is effect is not noticeable since people that are hundred-millionaires and billionaires like me hoard more sP than we spend.

Item Drive can also increase the value of somethings.

If your shop is large enough (and mine is huge) 's comment about the unreliability about hoard shops doesn't matter. My shop is so big that I can't really price it all over the course of three months, and this works in my favor as the prices of things sometimes go up.

I can't help but notice that the breakpoint as analyzed here is approximately where the market has placed the value of the Humming Power Crystals. Fragmentizing nearly everything unsellable is probably worth doing.

When there are less people here yes there's less competition for the rares, but the shops restock based on how many people there are so experience and logic tells me limiting restocking to the wee-hours is not good advice.

If you're hand-pricing, you can totally stomp autopricers since users can only do it once a day. If you really need to sell something, reprice that particular thing often.