I've had a lot of downtime this Morostide, so I've been a prolific trick-or-treater. I also used a gold account medal to get autopricing for the season. I've noticed in my sales history that single people buy me out of lower-priced items, like 9 Gourd Witch Hanging Planters in 18 seconds. Why, though? Are they caching them away for when the price goes up? Are they going into pets' treasure chests? (In at least one case, no.) Are they trying to drive up the price by buying the top-listed items and then dumping their own onto the market at the new higher lowest price? I've never done that, but I think (am not sure) that that would be an effective way to rake sP into one's shop till. I've been there, I only just got the Shop Till Saver achievement. I have no idea what the odds for each explanation. A lot of people seem to be doing it, so it's probably not a niche reason.

It could be for pet TCs, they could love the item and just want to collect it, they might be saving it for when it's retired and more expensive, or maybe they're fragging it :D I know I just bought nearly 100 Vampire Guitars to feed to the Fragmentizer

probably fragging, or maybe they hoard them in case the recycle beast asks for them eventually c:

99% of the time when I do, its for fragging.

There didn't used to be a reason to buy them other than you liked them, there never was much of a demand. You could go five years and the price did not go up and there was no fragmentizer.

When NPCs Cinthia and Quentin started asking for them in quests, then they become valuable. Most people will spend much more than the cheapy price these items are selling for now in order to complete these quests six months from now.

There didn't used to be much in the way of Achievements if any back then either. Some of these items may become Achievement items later, and this will make them shoot up in value even more sharply.

Autoprice at your own risk and only put items you don't care about in an autopriced shop.

Some people make most of their SP by restocking; catching rare items in the restockable shops and reselling them at market price.

If you decide, for whatever reason, to price something that is very rare quite low, in most markets, that wouldn't affect things much. But we have this thing on subeta called the Autopricer. People get on the autopricer and ask their stuff to be set at the lowest price.

That means that if you think it would be a nice thing to do to put something rare up for a really low price, and let one person have a really good deal, but people autoprice before that one person finds it, suddenly the market is flooded with massively underpriced items.

People who buy items to sell do not want to sell them at less than they paid just because someone wants to be nice and sell something that costs 25k to restock for 9000 sp, either because they're not using it, they didn't check the price, or they figure they got it for free on a quest so why sell it at 50k like everyone else?

So if they see 20 of that item hitting the market for 9000 sp, they will buy those 20 items so that they don't have to sell theirs at a loss and neither does any other restocker. I currently have like 50 copies of an item in my shop because someone decided to sell it at 1/10th of the market price and right after that a bunch of people autopriced.

And sometimes that "underprice" is the true price and now the buyer can finally afford them for TCs or something, or that underprice was a mistake and someone thinks they can make a profit.

During Luminaire folks will give different people the same present, so if they have ten friends, they'll buy ten copies of the same thing.

Because they can.

sorry for the late reply. but i hope it elucidated the mystery a bit, since im sure i'm not the only one doing this. ;)

Item Drive may be a reason. - not for holiday stuff, though.

So I drove the price of the Charming Medusa Plushie up while it was still dropping without meaning to. Because I have so damned many now and I still want more. But I've run into two issues with this - I've priced myself out of the market AND I've priced others out of the market by snapping up the lower priced Gorgons so now the plushie is basically in this weird limbo. I'm not one of the super rich Subeta users that can just go "I'm going to buy up 28,000 of this one item!"

The reason behind my buying it up? I'm a huge Greek history/mythology buff. Always have been, always will, AC Odyssey just bought the love back in force. So tiny, adorable Medusa plushies? All your plushies shall belong to me.

[edit]Thank you, anon! <3

It's not. And it shouldn't be, because there are always people pricing their entire shops way too low. Sometimes they want to get rid of a bunch of stuff they've been hoarding. Sometimes they actively want to lower the market price below what's fair because they think they're Fighting Capitalism or something. (Seriously, go fight capitalism somewhere that it counts, okay? Anyone who has enough free time to restock and sell on Subeta probably isn't making a whole lot of money IRL.)

Usually, though, they're new players who don't understand how rarity or the economy on the site works, so they price stuff really low after questing because 'they got it for free and they want to be nice' and they don't understand why everyone else has a high price on that item.

If someone buys out a bunch of shops on a really common, cheap item--that's usually for fragging.

But people who price items that are normally pretty expensive super low "to be nice", "to Fight Wall Street", "because it's funny" or "because I'm sick of looking at all this crap in my vault" at times when the site is not very busy can cause prices to drop precipitously when people run the autopricer without looking at the results.

After that, the people who restock for their sp will absolutely buy them all.

ok, i just read the rules again, and indeed, there's no mention of that aspect. i'm sure it was there at some point though. i don't like making up rules for places that don't belong to me. ;p

The idea of fighting capitalism on subeta sounds ridiculous if you ask me. and i agree, if you want to fight it, do it some other place where it counts. XD And yes, i am one of the people who buy the really cheap items for fragging. up until recently, i thought that those who undercut do it because like you said, they just want the item sold already, and sometimes it's a typo -it happened to me to find a mispriced WL item, and i was surprised nobody else saw it before me. i bought it and returned it to the owner. and i was lucky to get a discount on it afterward. ;p /i didn't want issues with the person selling it, getting reported and all the jazz.

Its all in the game,,

I agree with some of the above, when I buy multiples, it's usually for the fragmentizer. The only other times I buy more than one is books, because I need 10 for all my pets, or if I find a plushie/beanbag/card that I need for a quest, that I also don't have in my collection

Wow, there are people out there that petty? O.o

Are rare items "supposed" to cost more in the user economy? The user shop economy is essentially frictionless, and many items aren't purchased "at retail price" (e.g. they're free, from quests or the Free Shop) so a user's price for an item essentially expresses its value to that user. 's profile that says that account purchases underpriced items in user stores. What's the "intended" price of an item?

I never thought you made it up, don't worry! I thought that perhaps you'd seen it on another site. If there's ever been a rule like that on subeta, I'd be in trouble, although I'm not trying to "drive prices up", just keep them at a level where I'm not losing sp reselling restockable items.

You're quite right that undercutting is sometimes a mistake. It's pretty easy to tell when that's the case, though. The most common mistake, and one that I've made myself, is leaving off the last zero, which places you at 90% under the last seller. Transposing numbers so that 54000 becomes 45000 is also easy to do.

You won't get reported for buying these items. Or any items. It was nice of you to tell the seller, and I have been told about things like this too, and I appreciate it. But it's not required by the rules. There actually are no rules whatsoever about shop pricing, refunds or anything else of that sort.

However, if you see a price drop from say 50000 to 25000 or even 2500, that's usually not an accident. That's usually deliberate, and when this happens, the same shop names and usernames tend to show up.

Sometimes the shops even have names that imply they are deliberately trying to disrupt the market, or when you go to the shop, the text will read something like this: "Don't comment me to tell me my prices are wrong, if you don't like my undercuts, buy it and resell it yourself."

I notice this when I'm hand pricing my shops--and usually, when you see this, one of the shops at the lower price has a whole lot of other stuff discounted way below market, so you know it's definitely not an accident. The other shops will have all the other items at normal prices, so you can tell that they autopriced.

There's no time to tell each and every seller when there's been a ton of people autopricing at a crazy price, you just have to buy them all if you don't want to sell your own items at a 90% discount.

(This is especially frustrating when you're low on sp and you can't actually do this; at that time, the best thing to do is put the affected item into your vault until the market recovers.)

The problem is the autopricer. That is why buying up underpriced items is a public service, in addition to a way to make profit.

Without the autopricer, I wouldn't have any issue with someone saying, "oh well, I got this for free, I'm gonna sell it for 50 sp" when Carl gives them a Subeautique item. (I'd still buy it and resell it, because basically FREE MONEY, but I wouldn't be mad at those people if I couldn't afford to buy 50 of the same item.)

The autopricer is a Gold Account feature that allows you to set every price in your shop equal to the lowest price in the market. Most people use it because it's easy and pricing your shops by hand, like I do, takes a lot of time.

So, if one person just says, "ah I got it for free" and prices it at 50 SP, and 20 people with the item in their shop use the autopricer, there will now be 20 or more copies of that item on sale for 50 SP. If a big shop that has 40-50 copies of the item (which usually doesn't happen with SBQ items, but can happen with rare books or jewellery items) autoprices, it may take weeks for the market to recover unless someone who has a ton of SP comes along and buys them all up, because as long as there are any there at that price, the autopricer will set every single shop's price for that item to 50 SP.

The way the economy is intended to work, you're supposed to buy items from the restocking shops and resell them. Every item has a rarity, ranging from really common to super rare. Really common items are worthless for restocking sales; you would only buy them if you wanted to use them, in a spell, to make a scroll, to feed or read to your pets, &c. A lot of them are cheaper to buy from other users.

But items that are super rare usually sell much higher. Jewellery items typically sell at twice their price or around 70K if they're super rare, so a person who gets one for free and prices it at 500-20000 sp has the potential to screw over a lot of people who autoprice. Rare books can sell at 10-20 times their price.

A lot of people make their SP this way. Items with rarity 86-99 are almost never in the shop, and people who nab them to resell don't want someone who doesn't get it to price them at cost or less and then have 40 people autoprice right afterward. The only reason you can sell them for a profit is that they are not in the shop often, so people can't get them for the list price unless they're willing to stalk the shops.

There is a plushie in the restocking shops that sells for 100 million sp because it shows up so infrequently. I got one on a quest and sold it for 100 million within a day. I also got a few nastygrams from people trying to convince me that I was being a meanie, because I was the only person selling one, but I told them the truth which was that I had looked up the price on Subeta Lodge since nobody was selling any, and if it didn't sell in a reasonable time I'd lower the price gradually.

Consider: if I had sold it for 50000 SP because there were none in the stores and "I got it for free" I'd have made someone else really happy, but I'd also have shot myself in the foot.

If you can't figure out what the price should be because there aren't a lot in the market, use Subeta Lodge. Don't just discount by 50 or 90 percent because you don't understand why other sellers have a high price on something you got "for free".

Ironically, newer users also try to sell items from the non-restocking shops (575, Fine Fabrics, Zombie Den) at a profit because they're "special".

You cannot do this and make SP. Any item from a shop that's open year round and doesn't require event currency is always available at list price, so only people who are unaware of that fact will buy it for more. Your best bet is not to buy them unless you are sure that you like them. If you decide you don't like them any more, you won't get rid of them unless you undercut the shop and take a small loss.

i rarely pay attention to shop names :( i can't remember them long term. well, there are a few exceptions, but i think their owners autoprice.

this item i saw mispriced sells for 11mil? or so? (i put it in a TC) and its wrong price was under 1000sp something ridiculous like this that i have no idea how it could happen unless the user was pricing by hand, and mis-clicked or was looking at the wrong item...

i don't think the rule i thought existed was related to mispriced items. as i remember it, it was making reference to 1 user buying let's say all items (usually when there's only a handful of them for sale) and then trying to resell them for 5x as much. IE: there are 2 items in user shops selling for 10 mil, i buy them and reprice them at 50mil. (and let's assume you can't find that item currently RS anywhere n site). So i thought a situation like this was against the rules. But i now saw no such rule... and i find it bizarre, because why on Earth/Subeta/Atebus, would i create such a rule if Keith himself didn't? o.o unless the rule did exist at some point and they got rid of it. o.o