Jita - my central distribution warehouse

I would say 90% of what i sell is bought from Sell Orders in Jita.

10% of what i sell i buy outside of Jita.  These are typically Blueprints that come from NPCs in other Regions.

How this worked historically

If one of my Trade locations needed one of those Blueprints that are not found in Jita to sell i would Buy it at source from the Sell Order and have it couriered.

That was quite a tedious mechanical operation requiring my spreadsheet to remember where these items could be sourced from.  And made for tedious couriering of say one item for 500m collateral from the back of beyond and so only 10m of fees,

Jita is now the central warehouse

The aim now is for 100% of all items to leave from Jita.

This is much easier to manage and avoids all the issues of multiple clicking to open to characters to buy these items.  Loads of clicks.

Therefore, what i now do is buy up a stock of these non-Jita items and courier them to Jita to sit in inventory and wait to be couriered to the eventual Trade location to be sold.

So, every so often i buy up several billion isk worth to courier to Jita.

Of course, these items are couriered twice in their life cycle vs once for items sourced in Jita.  I typically pay 2% courier fees.  Therefore, what i do is add this 2% to the cost of the item so that when i sell it i recover the cost of this additional courier leg.

But it is well worth it.  Life is much easier now.

The downside is that i have isk tied up in inventory.

. . . .  . . i may be mistaken but i think this is the business model FedEx fall into which worked so successfully.