Some bazaar owners definitely do better than others, not sure how.
I do okay, but my bazaar is mainly low-priced stuff. And I don't sell in high volumes. From what I see, the ones who sell at high volume take far less in profit per item. I get at least $100 profit per item, often several hundred dollars, but I've seen some people buy my items and resell them at just $10 profit.
I still buy 100 items a day from the city shops, since that's a quick profit. Brick is the cheapest item to buy at $5 each, and it sells quickly. You can make $600+ profit for each brick. Beer is even better. It costs $10 per beer, but you can sell them for around $900 profit each.But beer is very hard to get - Bits 'n' Bobs restocks beer every quarter hour, only 1,000 at a time, and they usually sell out by a minute after that.
You can buy 100 of an item or you can diversify and buy 50 or 20 each of different items. I haven't found this to be worthwhile. I pick an item that sells well and just get 100 of it.
Once you complete the biology degree, the pharmacy unlocks and you can buy empty blood bags at $15,000 each and resell them for around $18,000 each for about $3,000 profit. You're getting more profit but putting in a lot more money to do it. Plus, they don't sell nearly as fast as brick or beer. You can fill them with your blood and sell the filled ones for more money, but obviously not 100/day. This works better if you have a rarer blood type than A+.
I'm also what I think of as an aggregator, meaning I'll buy up all those items listed directly in the item market and resell in my bazaar. People pay more to not have to click 100 times just to get 100 of an item.
Once you reach level 15, you can fly to other countries, buy flowers or plushies there, and then sell them in your bazaar for a lot more profit. You can buy other things overseas, but check the overseas prices against the Torn item market prices, because often the overseas prices are much higher. Or the profits are just lower than with flowers and plushies.
Of course there are also people who underprice their items in their bazaars, so those are easy to buy and resell. If an item is selling for $10,000 in both the bazaars and the direct listings, and someone prices their items at $9,000, it's easy to buy them and flip them for a $1,000 profit each.
Get to know typical prices. Some items barely change price-wise. Others go up and down in a certain price range. So if you know that an item fluctuates between $600 and $900, you can grab them at $600 and expect them to go up to $900 even if they're not selling for that amount when you look.
Look at the going rates before deciding on your price. If you want a quick sale, you might price your item just below the lowest bazaar rate, but there's no need to price it hundreds of dollars below that rate. That just drags down the market and lowers your profits.
And please, please, do not sell just 1 or 2 of a low-priced item at a time, and then restock it once you've sold it just to get the merit. If you only have a few of an item, that's fine. But if you have 100 and you keep lowballing your price selling them one at a time, you'll piss off valid bazaar vendors. I would say that's less true at high prices. If you're selling Xanax and want to minimize your risk of being mugged when you're offline, you might sell only 1 or 2 at a time. But you wouldn't have that many to sell anyway. (If you had 100 Xanax, you'd probably be higher level, stronger, richer, better able to bear the risk anyway.)
If you really want to reduce risk on high-priced items, sell them through a trader rather than through your bazaar. You'll sacrifice some profit, as traders buy at below-market prices, but that can be well worth it when you're selling a $200 million cesium stick or even a $4 million eDVD.
You can PM or message people selling directly in the item market and ask them to sell directly to you. They will get more money because they won't have the market fee, and you won't have to buy each item individually, plus you'll have a steady supply source. This will require staying in touch with them. I've had a lot of newbies ask to sell directly to me, but they don't usually keep coming back. (I'm not up for staying in constant contact with them, though.)
Don't overload your bazaar. You can't arrange which items people see first, so if people have to look through a huge bazaar to find what they want, they may not bother. This can happen especially if you sell weapons, because each one displays separately. If you have a few dozen of one type of weapon, say a diamond-bladed knife, just put a few in at one time and restock as they sell.
EDIT based on info from Kobie: You can arrange your bazaar by selecting Manage Items and dragging the items up and down the list by the cross icon on the left end of the item row. So please do arrange them so your box of tissues isn't buried 20 rows down in all your guns.
Well, I guess these are the basics. I hope some of the more successful bazaar owners will share some of their tips.
I don't know how you can go from $3 million to only $760 in three days. When someone mugs you, they only get 10 or 15% of what you have. They can't get that much again for another 24 hours. [EDIT: Correction: They can get a full percentage again after 14 hours.] They can only get a portion of that percent, from 0 right after the first mugging to gradually more as the 24-hour protected period goes on. So maybe 12 hours later, they'd get another 7%, but that should restart the 24-hour protection period.
So say they got 10% the first time. You'd be down $300,000, at $2,700,000. If they wait a full day, the next time they mug you, they'd get 10% of the $2.7 mil: $270,000. That would take you down to 2,430,000. Waiting again a full day, they'd get 10% of that: $243,000, still leaving you with over $2 million in three days.
If they mugged you every few hours, they'd get less each time. It shouldn't leave you with only $760.
But seriously, why would you carry that much on you unless you're buying something or traveling with it? In that case, you need to get it out of wherever you keep it (bank, vault) right before you go to the airport or the estate agent's or the item market, then be online and ready to make your deposit or buy your goods as soon as you land.
Obviously you can't attack him yourself, but someone else wrote that you co-lead a faction? So why not sic your entire faction on him? Or ask a few higher-level faction members to do you a favor and mug him back? Or put bounties on him and keep him out of action in the hospital?
After a taste of that, you can make him an offer back, that he return your money (with interest, if you're able to keep enforcing the attacks on him) and leave you alone.
The same is not true for the points market. Listings are in order of price per point, from lowest to highest. There's no way to sort according to lot size, for example. (We're not all billionaires. Not all of us can afford to buy hundreds or thousands of points at one time, not even 50 or 25. Some of us want to buy maybe only 5 or 10, or even just 1 point.)
So if a small lot isn't listed on the displaying page, there's no way to see the rest of the listed offerings.
Please add page links like the ones for the item market.
It's not the points market, IMO. Sure, the prices of plushie (and flower) sets have gone down because of the points market, but that isn't actually because of a decrease in demand for plushies (or flowers) themselves. People still want just as many so they can trade them in for points, because they still use just as many points.
I've seen prices on some plushies go down and others go up. You'd think they'd all go up or down together, but there are other forces at work besides the price of points and even demand. Supply is one. You get people thinking that camels sell for the most money (by the way, pandas have the highest profit margin, not camels), so they set out to buy only camels overseas, and then there are more camels than other things people need. So demand for camels slows for a while and prices fall to move out the inventory.
The prices people set is another force. If everyone is selling camels for $99,000 and you want your camels to sell first, you price them at $98,999. That doesn't have much effect on the market if you have only 5 camels to sell, but if you have 40,671 camels and you put them all up for sale at once in your bazaar (or by listing them directly in the market), other people will despair of ever getting theirs sold and they will undercut you. And then someone will undercut them... and prices fall until demand catches up or until some wealthy person buys up all the now bargain-priced camels to prop up the market.
Sometimes there just seems to be no rhyme or reason to it. Candy prices have skyrocketed these last several weeks. Brick prices tanked for a while, then resurged.
Several months back, I noticed that sport shades (sunglasses) were selling for $37,000 by the independent listers and for only $6,000 in the bazaars. I bought a bunch, thinking I was going to make a quick, big profit selling them for about $18,000. Nothing happened, and then months later, someone bought out my supply. I had given up on them ever selling at that point, thinking I'd made a bad investment. After all, sports shades have no real use. But when I checked the market after they sold, the bazaars were selling them for $18,000 - $19,000 and the indie prices were still up around $37,000.
Back to plushies: I'd been traveling to the Caymans quite a lot before I got my palace and vault, so I built up a stash of stingrays. Put them on the market at the current market price (about $10,500) just as the stingray market fell. They didn't move. I had paid the fee to list them, so I left them there. Then I got my bazaar and sold the rest at the new market prices, and started riding the market up and down, buying at about $9,000 and selling at about $9,700. The market rarely made it back up to $10,000, but eventually it did and some of the listed ones sold. Then we had Museum Days and most of the rest of them sold. Now only the two most expensive, at $12,000, are still waiting to be bought. Happily, the stingray market has swung upwards a lot more frequently lately.
So camels won't stay down forever. If you bought them from the UAR, you'll still make a good profit at current market rates. If you bought them from the market thinking they'd dipped low and would rise again, you have only to wait.
I was going by what the wiki said about rank (at the start of the entry). It didn't mention battle stats, but of course battle stats are one of the main aspects of progress in the game, so it would only make sense that they'd factor into rank.
Good info, good to know even though it isn't the way it works now.
Though I would think that buying off a bounty would be done by the person the bounty is on. In this case, the person who created the bounty and I worked out the misunderstanding (he was buy-mugged after I'd made a large purchase, but not by me) and he was willing to remove the bounties.
Lesson learned: Others will watch bazaar sales and buy-mug when they see the items disappear if the seller's level is fairly low. So if I'm going to buy that much at once, I should maybe check the seller's level and arrange to do it as a private trade if it puts him at risk to be mugged. Of course that means I'd risk someone else buying it before I could.
If you look at the bar below their body, it probably says "MITIGATED" every time you hit them and there's no decrease in their life. Yes, that's because their defense stat is very high, and yes, training only defense or mostly defense can get you that high.
A rank of "average" means nothing re their battle stats. Rank is for overall progress in the game, based on crimes, net worth and level according to the wiki.
Players don't have to go up a level when a new one becomes available to them. Some people choose to hold down their level, I guess thinking it will fool others, and obviously, sometimes it works. One way to tell if someone is a true level 15 (or true any other level) or holding at that level is to look at his stats page. Towards the bottom of the Attacks section you'll see HLB (highest level beaten) If someone is a 15 and his HLB is 70 or something, you can bet he's level holding.
You won't make money in the item market easily until you know the prices. It won't help to buy something expecting to re-sell it for more money if it's already selling for a higher than usual price.
You could sell items in your inventory at the going rates. If you have a stock of filled blood bags, those are more in demand now. Sell off an eDVD or two, maybe, though the rates on those are a bit (just a bit) lower than usual. Neumune pills are up, though.
If you attained the top rank in the medical job, you can sell revives.
You can also just let the upkeep go unpaid for a few days with no problems.
The flower set is made up of a dahlia, a banana orchid, a crocus, an orchid (a regular one), heather, edelweiss, a ceibo flower, an African violet, a cherry blossom, a peony and tribulus omanense.
The plushie set is made up of a sheep, a teddy bear, a kitten, a jaguar, a stingray, a wolverine, a fox, a nessie (a Loch Ness monster), a chamois, a monkey, a lion, a panda bear and a camel.
You can buy them in the item market or in other countries. (The sheep, teddy bear and kitten can be bought at Bits 'n' Bobs.)
You can sell a set (or many sets) to a trader, who will pay more than for the individual items.
Once you have the biology degree, the museum unlocks and you can trade in a set for points, which can be sold on the points market or used to buy things in the points market, like extra energy or a bazaar.
You put in your 25 job points and you get mailed a list of the top 10 most wanted people and .... the next top 10 most wanted people, meaning the top 20 most wanted people. The amount of the reward money is listed next to each person's name. Because these are the most wanted people, the reward for one person might be $3 million and for another, $1 million. (They aren't exact amounts, more like $3,418,593.)
So you pick one you think you can defeat and go attack him. If you beat him, under the options to mug, hospitalize, etc., there will be an Arrest button. Click that, and you get the reward - if no one else beats you to it. If they do, the Arrest button won't show up for you.
You can arrest anyone who has an arrest button (if you work in a detective agency), because obviously there are others out there who didn't make the top 20 and so aren't on the list. Their rewards may still be over $1 million, or they may be a few hundred thousand, or even very low, like only $50,000.
You take your chances trying to find these people by searching on people with 5,000 crimes or more. They may not have enough or not have the right types of crimes to be up for arrest, or someone may have arrested them long ago.
1. If you're plushie running for a trader, you'd agree with that person on what you get. It could be just one type of plushie, but you'll make more money if you sell them in sets.
2. People buy plushies to make sets, which they can convert to points in the museum. You need the history degree to unlock and use the museum. Points can be sold for profit; people buy points to use in training and for other things.
3. Plushie prices do fluctuate, but I've read that pandas are the most profitable to buy.
1. Daily activities include buying/selling in the item market, searching the city for finds (this only take a minute or two a day), faction chaining and other things. There's also bounties and car racing. And you can work on earning the various merits. (Others will give you better answers on this.)
2. So, what I was saying above about city finds. You zoom in on the map, and you'll see little circles with things in side. Click on them to take them. You don't get new things every day, usually only once or twice a week. But if you've been inactive, they've piled up, so you should have a lot to find. Make sure your territories are turned off on the map, or you'll see the rackets inside the same little circles.