A short guide to the Profit Calculator

On the right hand side of every page, there exists a link to the profit calculator. This is the calculator I use to aid in my merchanting and it does many of the tedious calculations for you. All of the boxes where you input numbers are colored and the output boxes are all directly below. The area that involves just buying gold and selling items from the boutique has green boxes. Just below that is a mini calculator for calculating how much a single item from a stack of 100 packs or 50 rep badges from the boutique would cost so you can find the total number of items and the break-even price of each. The calc is currently set for buying 9 gold worth of rep badges at 45 silver each for 50.

To modify the calculator, you will have to click file and make a copy if you have your own google account or if not, hover over download and save it to your computer in a format you can use. Make sure you don’t open it in read only or protected view or you won’t be able to edit it.

How to use for buying gold and selling items

Starting from the top left, input the price you bought or will buy your gold for. Do not worry about the 2% fee because the calculator takes care of that for you. If you already know the rest of the information, simply input that and the numbers you want to know will appear below. If you don’t, use the unit cost calculator below to find that out.

If you are confused as to what bundle means, 50 rep badges from the boutique at 45 silver is a single bundle. The gold cost of that bundle is 45 silver, there are 50 items in that bundle, and lets say that I want to buy twenty bundles because two bundles is 90 silver and ten times more is 9 gold. Once you put those numbers in the unit cost calc, it will tell you what numbers need to be plugged in above. Of course, you always want to substitute a unit sell price above the minimum or you will be losing money. So take those numbers and write them in the green boxes and you’ll see every number you need to know.

The break-even price is included there because not everyone needs to use the unit cost calculator. The profit per item is simply the amount of coin you will make from each individual item. The total profit is self-explanatory and the percent profit shows how well your coin worked for you. I’d avoid doing anything if this number is under 2% unless you are selling out fast because changing market conditions can easily cause you to lose money.

How to use for buying and selling gold

Like last time, you also input the price you bought or will buy gold for in the top left. Then all you do is put the gold selling price in the leftmost yellow box and how many gold you wish to sell. The numbers are often negative because gold prices are often too close together to do this. Profit per gold is the same as profit per item was before, total profit explains itself, and the percent profit is also the same concept as before. If the percent profit is above a positive 3% and it looks like gold is selling and buying decently quickly, do it as many times as you can because its good profit with little extra effort on your part.

Merchanting Basics using Gold

Merchanting through use of the boutique is essentially the same as merchanting without gold. If you choose to do rep badges or a non-token pack, you still only need a few mil to start merchanting in most cases. However, you have to do more math and have to have knowledge on how to buy and sell gold through the auction house. Why should you bother with the auction house when you could just do tokens or whatever instead and make about the same? If you haven’t found out already, tokens have a LOT of competition, low profit margins, and after you get more than a few big notes worth of coin, you start having coin or tokens left at the end of the day.

So what does learning how to use the gold trading system offer you? It offers many benefits but lets start off with the big three.

1. More sales volume – On a good day, you can move over a hundred gold worth of token packs which is nearly impossible to do with buying and selling tokens.
2. More opportunities – PWI holds sales that give all kinds of merchanting opportunities. Token pack sales are the most popular to merchant but the greatest money is made through others such as the Dragon’s fire pack or the Hot color packs. Every now and then, a sale will pop up where you can make hundreds of millions of coin in a short span of time such as the anni sales or the first easy rider sale.
3. Better profit margins – On just about everything but packs, you can exceed ten percent profit margins which is often much higher than what tokens will allow you.

There are risks and conditions though which is why not using gold is better at the beginning. You need around 50 or 60 mil to start merchanting packs which give reliable profit. You also cannot get your money back the moment you want it because you are only selling the item and not buying it. You also risk having another person bid over you when buying gold which either makes you wait or rebid and pay your 2% fee twice. By attempting to buy no more than 9 gold at a time at a price noticeably higher than the next highest bidder, you can avoid these risks.

You already know the basics of merchanting, so now you must learn the basics of the Gold Trading system. The things boxed or underlined in green are for buying gold which is what we are most interested in. The same has been done with yellow for the things that have to do with selling gold. The white box is where you put in how much gold you want to buy/sell and how much you want to buy/sell it for.

Lets begin with buying gold. You must first deposit enough coin for your bid. I usually deposit all of my coin, bid, and then withdraw what is left to make it simpler. When buying gold at first, try to avoid buying more than nine gold at a time and make your bid at least 1k over the highest bidder. In this case, the highest bid for buying gold is 1,430,100 as seen in the green box, so I’ll set mine to 1,431,000. Beware, there is a fee for buying and selling gold which is 2% more than however much you are paying. Make sure to take this into account when you calculate costs or plan on buying/selling gold. The profit calculator I have on this website already takes the fee into account.

As you can see, I already deposited more than enough money to set up a bid to buy 6 gold from the AH. Be sure that you are on the buy tab when you are buying gold. An easy way to tell is that when buying gold, the fee will be in coin. If you are selling gold, your fee will be in silver. Anyways now we just wait for the bid to be filled. The reason why you do less then ten gold is because people that Cash shop will most often buy ten dollars worth of gold at a time and due to the 2% AH fee for selling gold, they can only sell nine of that gold.

If you look in in the lower right box, you can see my freshly entered bid. You can also see the coin I have remaining in the lower left box. Now, you simply wait for someone to sell you gold. Sometimes, people will bid over you and it will take a while for it to fill. Don’t be too hasty in canceling your bid if this happens. If you find that it happens to you often, start bidding around 5-10k higher than everyone else. However, if your order ends up being buried under a bunch of orders from other people, feel free to hit the listings button, click on your bid, and cancel it to get your money back minus the 2% fee.

While you are waiting, I’ll give you a taste of the next post about why merchanting is so awesome. Gold trading seems confusing at first but this is the reason why merchanting with gold is so profitable. 95% of players take one look at that window and choose to buy from a cat-shop instead. After all, they don’t want to put in the effort of buying gold to get what they want cheaper later on when they can simply have it now. One can get very rich by merchanting this way over and over again.

Lets say you make 5% profit each time you buy 9 gold of rep and sell out. 5% profit doesn’t sound like a lot until you realize you can sell out several times per day and if you hypothetically moved all of your money from gold, to rep, and back 14 times in one week or twice per day, you turned 12 mil or so into 25 mil. That is because those small 5%  just profits stacked up 14 times in a row. Why did the money double when 5% added up 14 times is only 70%? Because the more money you get, the more product you can move and that means you can use your profits to merchant better. Its almost exactly like a snowball rolling down a hill where it starts off small and the larger it gets, the faster it can grow.

Once you come back and your bid has filled, your gold will be in your current available funds. To take it out and buy boutique items with it, simply hit withdraw and enter the number you wish to withdraw. After that, open up the boutique and buy the item you wish to merchant. Be weary on what you buy though.

Make sure what you plan to merchant has a good market. Even if there is little competition, there may be a good reason why nobody is doing it. It may simply not be profitable like selling most things off-sale or it may just move really slowly because the demand isn’t really there. Token packs are USUALLY a safe bet followed by d-orbs, platinum hp charms, and rep badges. I repeat, DO NOT blindly buy these things because it was a good idea at the time for me. There was a time where mysterious chips and medals of glory were a good idea too but things change. Use your head and find what sells best for YOU.

Anyways, everything after that is the same as you’ve done before. Set up a shop to sell your item and regularly visit the AH to buy more gold. During certain times, one can also simply buy and sell gold to profit but be careful to take into account the 2% fee both ways or you can find yourself losing money. You’ll also have to sell 50 gold to get to a whole gold amount because of the 2 silver fee per gold. If you are having problems with calculating costs for merchanting boutique items or gold, I’d advise you to see this short guide on using the profit calculator.

Merchanting Basics without Gold

To start merchanting, all you need to do is farm a few million coins to use! If you start with more than that, you’ll make money faster, have more options, and be able to monitor your cat-shop less. You’ll begin by making a cat-shop that buys and sells a single product. As for what to sell, look around in Archosaur and ask yourself what things players use or need the most. Odds are, you thought of tokens, mirages, rep badges, and Pstones. These are the biggest markets for starter merchants. For this guide, I will be using tokens as an example but do not assume that it is the best way to make coins. If you choose to sell something else, just mentally replace the word token with what you are merchanting. (Merchanting rep is mostly the same as the others except you replace buying rep with your shop with buying gold instead which will be covered in the next guide)

Watch the other cat-shops that are merchanting what you want and see how much they buy/sell in a few hours. Sometimes, a particular market can have so much competition that it isn’t worth doing or there may be no market for your item that day. It happens from week to week so you often need to be flexible in moving from one item to another if your profits dry up for too long.

Anyways, lets assume you wanted to begin with tokens. Buy a single token from the cheapest cat-shop around and set up your own cat-shop to buy as many tokens as you are able to. What price do you buy your tokens at? Find the cat-shops near the boutique agent in west arch and look at the shop titles for a guide. The prices in their cat-shops usually read sell price followed by buy price. Sometimes the shop uses something like S>13000 and B>12500 to stand for selling and buying prices. Make sure to check the shops with the lowest buy prices and highest sell prices to make sure they haven’t sold out or are lying about their price.

A quick look at the image above will show you what buy and sell prices I chose. I’ll choose a buy price the same as the shop circled in yellow and a sell price slightly above the sell price of the shops circled in red. Why? I looked at all the shops around and the one circled in yellow had the highest buy price and still has thousands of tokens to buy. Since it is the only shop left buying at that price, I should be fine buying for the same price. The shops circled in red are selling only a few hundred tokens and most of the ones at a lower price have sold out. So for the conditions in that picture, 12,950 and 12,600 are good prices to begin with.

As seen above, you usually want to set your buy price close to the highest buying price and your sell price close to the lowest selling price. You don’t have to always beat your competition in price. As a general rule of thumb, the only time where you have to go lower in price than them is when there are many people at the same price or one person is buying/selling thousands of tokens and you aren’t making any sales. Always make sure to check that you are still making money when you do this. An example of how my shop is set up is below.

While its a good guideline, should you always follow the tactic above? Heck no! When I went to sell those tokens back to the shop highlighted in yellow, I found out that said shop was glitched and wouldn’t buy tokens. Therefore, the actual buy price should have been 12,200 or so. You should use competitor’s prices to find out where to start but you need to be able to adjust your prices due to changing conditions. What would of happened if I left my shop buying at that price is that most people that were unable to sell to the shop in yellow would sell all their tokens to me. If I wanted to get a lot of tokens fast, staying at this price would be a good idea but often, you want to keep your buy price and sell price as far apart as conditions allow. If you are repeatedly being bought or sold out in a short period of time, its usually a sign that you need to decrease your buy price or increase your sell price respectively. Likewise, if you aren’t making sales or buying tokens and other shops are, you probably need to increase your buy price or decrease your sell price.

Many make the mistake of undercutting another merchant just to get sales faster. The thing is, your competition will probably do the same thing to you resulting in both of you losing money in a spiral of undercutting. If someone insists on doing this even if you use the same price as them, remove the prices from your shop title or move your shop further away from theirs. When your prices are almost the same and your shops aren’t next to each other, people will often just buy from the closest shop so you’ll often make more money than they will trying to undercut everyone.

However, merchanting is competition. If you tried everything above and you aren’t making sales and they are, play their game even if it cuts your own profits because less profit is better than no profit. If you watch the markets and notice nobody is selling tokens to cat-shops and someone is undercutting your selling price, buy all their tokens if you can. This removes some of your competition and gives you more stock to sell. When you get enough coins, you may find that you start having coin left or unsold tokens each day. This is normal and is a good signal to start merchanting using gold.

Merchanting Intro

When you first began to play Perfect World, you probably had a very easy time collecting enough money for skills and gear. Even if the most expensive legendary gear at those low levels was out of reach, great gear was easy enough to come by. By the time you approached late game, however, the sad reality began to rear its ugly head. FC squads and high level BH squads started expecting you to have gear worth millions of coin. Even at those levels, getting the coin for the gear was still feasible.

Once you hit endgame though, squads start rejecting you if you lack certain skills or don’t have gear equal to or better than the gear you are trying to farm. Some classes simply can’t farm well at all. Many are also unable to cash shop their gear either. Well, I may have a solution to help you either get to the point where you can get into farming squads to or to replace farming entirely. The best part is you won’t feel like you are wearing NPC gear anymore. (Please excuse the shiny daggers. I had an accident with industrial glue a few months back and they refuse to come off now)

The answer? Instead of cash shopping your gear, cat-shop for your gear! All you need are a few things to become successful at cat-shop merchanting. First, you need to be able to dual-client or leave your computer on while you aren’t playing. You get bonus points if you can do both, but you just need to be able to run a cat shop for a decent portion of the day. If you are unable to, you are better off buying and selling gold or items in the AH or between cat-shops. For you, there will be a guide on this at some point in the future, but this is meant for those that can use kitty shops.

Second, you need to be able to use your brain. I am only able to teach you how to merchant and tips on finding what to merchant. You’ll be able to follow my advice in this guide with little thought but on what to merchant, that is a different matter. What is good or bad to sell can change weekly or even daily for some things and through the months some markets die while new ones appear. For example, stocking up on reputation as a sale ended used to be great for investing your money but now the sale is permanent which makes that tactic useless. Blindly following all the examples I will give on what I did without first checking if its still a good thing to do will result in either poor profits or actually losing money. If you don’t want to think for yourself, I am unable to help you.

To begin, we have to ask ourselves why cat shopping is profitable in the first place. The reason is the same thing that keeps the game alive…cash shoppers! PWI profits because cash shoppers do not want to put the time and effort into farming gear. They want their gear and they want it NOW. People buy from cat-shops on the same basis. They want what you are selling without the hassle of getting it themselves. For them, it takes too much effort to set up a cat-shop to buy or sell what they want or to use the Auction House to buy or sell gold. This is where you can get rich. Want to learn where to start? Read the merchanting basics!