Rising competition

I am definitely seeing rising competition in my main trade hubs of Amarr, Dodixie, Rens and Hek.

I see it every day when i update my Sales Orders to make sure they are the most competitive.  I am now updated 2x or 3x as many orders as i was 1 year ago.  And this shines through in the rising Broker Relisting Fees that i face.

As the chart below clearly shows, the Broker Relist Fees as a % of revenues has been rising for 18 months now though more seriously for 12 months.

How are sales doing?

That all said, i am not seeing an obvious impact on sales.  I am doing better than 2024 so far.

The chart below shows the cumulative sales progress through each year from when i re-started in August 2020.

So, though i have a lot more competition my sales are not being affected.

Now i have to assume my new competitors are seeing sales, otherwise they would give up.  So therefore i assume the overall market size in these Trade Hubs has increased.

What does the constant reducing prices do for margins?

What the competition does mean though is that the margins i can command for the items i sell are lower which is seen by my cumulative profits slipping below last year.

And the chart below shows the profit margins i am making.  The Item Profit Margin, the yellow line, is simply the profit i make on each sale before any taxes and fees.  I aim for 25% ((Sale price - Cost price) / Sale price) but i am struggling to maintain this more recently.

In other words, i spend a lot of time making my Items for Sale a little bit cheaper everyday to keep them competitive and when they eventually sale the Item Profit Margin is lower.

And the the higher relist fees must be a headwind?

And then of course apply the higher Relist Fees i face (see the charr at the top) and this is bringing down my overall profits below both 2024 and 2023!

The margin chart above shows the effect overall - the blue line, which is the margins after all taxes and fees, is consistently below by 16% target.

What to do about all this

I stopped station trading in Jita - that saved me a lot of isk.

But i have no plans to pull out of Blueprints or other items in my Trade Hubs.

One thing though is that this is focusing my mind on other revenue streams such as manufacturing . . . . . . which i have been promising to do for a long time!

I have also started seeding new trading locations for corporations.  So far i have seeded locations to the tune of c310 billion isk in total.

Planetary Interaction is not a big isk spinner so i will let that be for now.

Research might work - but i will see if manufacturing will work first.