Finding new items to sell in the Trade Hubs

I was away for most of March and as time goes by the items i am selling in the Trade Hubs tend to fall to very low profit.  Hence, i am in continuous need of finding new items to sell.

It is a sort of cycle my Trading Business follows: Find new items to sell to replace existing items that no longer make profits.

So, with that, it is well worth reminding everyone how i go about finding new items to sell (and i am all ears for other ideas on this!).

For this exercise, all i use is Eve Central and a spreadsheet - but for our purposes we shall focus on Eve Central.  The spreadsheet merely make the searching task easier once i have the data from Eve Central.

Eve Central is a website which records the price of items on the Eve Market in all locations.  However, and here is the key point, it records the items by players automatically uploading the prices to the website via a small piece of software which monitors the Eve market as they browse it.

Therefore, the prices are only as complete and timely as those players browsing the Eve markets.

What i find is that the Jita prices are mostly complete and recent.  The Trade hubs also though to a lesser degree.  And then things start to deteriorate.


The Set up: Lets assume i am looking for new items to buy in Jita and to sell in Dodixie.  As always, i buy from sell orders in Jita - i don't put up buy orders myself.

I normally have my alt in Dodixie open - that is so i can check the Dodixie prices and volumes.  The Eve Central prices in Jita are normally correct.


The Method:

Firstly, open Eve Central and you will be presented with the Home Page as shown below:

Secondly, press the "Trade Finder" button as shown - this will open up the next page.  At the bottom of that page is the "System and Region Price Comparison Tool" as shown below:

Thirdly, because i am comparing prices in Dodixie to Jita i fill in the fields as shown above and then press the "Compare" button which, after some computing, brings up the final page which lists all the items in order of profit.

Finding the Items to sell:

At this point i copy the entire page to a spreadsheet and then look for items where the profit is at least 20% and the price to buy in Jita is above a certain value and below another value (in other words i don't want to be buying very lowly priced items but at the same time i don't want to by buying items priced over 2bn ISK).

When i come across an item that looks promising i use my alt at Dodixie to check the price of the item to make sure it is real (not inflated or an outlier) and also to make sure that the item does sell at least once every three days.

The most common issue i find is that there is no volume at the price stated - in otherwords, items on for sale at the recorded price are unlikely to be sold.

An example of one that may not work:

On the webpage there was a Federation Navy 1MN Afterburner which you can buy from Jita for 55m ISK and sell in Dodixie for 85m ISK.  And sure enough the prices check out - there are 4 sell orders up for 85m ISK.

However, there is no volume at this price, as shown below, and so it is not worth do this trade.

An example of one that should work:

On the webpage there was also a "Large Anti-Thermal Screen Reinforcer II" which could be bought from Jita for 32m ISK and sold in Dodixie for 39m ISK.

The 17 sell orders up at this price as shown below - so the price is real:

And, as shown below, the volumes are good as well!  Looks like we are seeing an average of 3 sold a day - that is bang inline with what i look for.  I could make profits before taxes of 7m ISK by spending 32m ISK and the price is stable because the volumes are low enough to mean that the high volume undercutters stay away.