A general guide on how to Import, Trade and Flip items on the FFXIV Marketboard
Importing, trading, and flipping items on the FFXIV Market Board is by far one of the easiest methods of making gil — without the need to quest or invest in crafting professions. You can earn millions each day from as few as five minutes of game time spent trading. All of which can be done as early as level 20 when you gain access to retainers!
FFXIV server-to-server travel allows you to visit any server in your region and purchase items off of those servers' Market Boards. You can then sell those items on the market board of your home server for a profit.
TIP: For various reasons, be it convenience or just a lack of knowledge, most players simply will not travel to other servers for purchases. This advantage allows you to profit from buying low on other servers to sell high on your own!
The number one rule of FFXIV trading is that you need to undercut. That means you should always provide the lowest price for whatever it is you’re selling.
Undercut: offer goods or services at a lower price than (a competitor)
Naturally, it’s both a risk and an investment to purchase any item and resell it. If you can't sell, then you lose gil. It's no different from the risk in crafting when you invest in raw materials to create and sell a finished product.
The only way to profit off a trade is to lock in a sale before the prices go down (which happens naturally over time as more players provide the same item and continue to undercut one another). You can sell and make a profit by undercutting any new listings in your auctions. If you don't undercut, the price may drop so low that it will cause you to lose gil in the process.
However, it’s not difficult to stay on top of this and undercut effectively with some simple tools.
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Generally you want to update your retainer's price and repost one gil below the competition. There are optional add ons that make this process easier, but we obviously can’t endorse them here, especially when it’s so easy to update the prices by hand.
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A tool that will seriously improve your trading is the Saddlebag Exchange Undercut Alerts. These alerts are a major quality-of-life improvement!
Undercut Alerts send players Discord messages whenever Universalis finds that you have been undercut. This makes it much more feasible to know when you must update your listing prices on each of your retainers. These messages also mean you no longer need to pull your retainers off the Market Board to check if they've been undercut. If you’re someone who has dozens of retainers, Saddlebag Exchange Undercut Alerts is a must-have for keeping tabs on all of your auctions and knowing when someone else is selling your stuff at a better price.
To start trading, let's take a basic example of buying low and selling high.
We can see this “Greatwood Planter” is listed for 262,496 gil on Famfrit (my home server) and is selling consistently at around that price:
However, it’s also currently available for only 52,500 gil on another server in my Data Center:
For this flip, I could travel to the Hyperion server, purchase the Greatwood Planter for 52,500 and then sell for 262,496 to net 209,996 gil revenue which (after in-game taxes and costs) comes out to about 199,500 gil profit.
(NOTE: The Universalis listing prices include the buyer taxes).
This is a very good trade with over a 75 percent return on investment (ROI). However, better profits can still be made for less cost and risk!
In FFXIV, there’s a default limit of 40 auctions available to each character (without purchasing additional retainers for $2 per month apiece) that means there will be many market gaps with items that can be sold on the market board, but no one is selling them.
If we look at the Bronze Skillet, for instance, we can see that absolutely none are currently listed on my server's market board.
TIP: This is one of the best profit opportunities when trading!
You can see that there are many options available to buy this item if we go beyond just that one server, however. A high quality version can be found on my Data Center for 4,200 gil. Meanwhile, the low quality version is up for only 105 gil!
In the example with the Greatwood Planter, we could not sell for more than 262,496 gil because there were other listings preventing sales at higher prices. However, with the Bronze Skillet, there are no other listings at all. Meaning we could try to sell a Bronze Skillet for any price we want!
You could try and sell for 900 million gil if you really, really wanted to and still technically have a chance to sell it. However, this is very unrealistic. You should consider the buying power of players and how much they will pay for the convenience of buying basic stuff from the Market Board instead of crafting it or finding the item themselves in-game.
A general rule of thumb is that, if you’re ever unsure what to price an item for, 70k is your go-to number. It’s a very small amount of gil for most players, but selling many items for 70k with very high-profit margins will earn you millions of gil in short order
- If trading the HQ (high quality) version of an item: buying for 4,200 and selling for 70k you can earn over 62k profit and an ROI of 89 percent.
- If trading the NQ (normal quality) version: buying for only 104 gil and selling for 70k, you can earn over 66k and almost a 94 percent profit for almost no risk at all!
You must also consider:
- High quality will sell better than low quality when an HQ version exists in ready supply.
- Items with only low quality — like furniture, minions, and miscellaneous items — do not have this issue and are easier to trade.
- Selling on a mannequin removes the sales tax.
Selling vendor items is also another strategy to gain profit. Vendors can only sell NQ versions of items, but for many reasons, players will still purchase vendor items from the Market Board instead. Sometimes they might not realize the item is available on a vendor somewhere in the world. Other times they might just prefer the convenience of the Market Board.
In FFXIV, vendors are sometimes difficult to find, their menus can be difficult to navigate, and (most annoying of all) the items are often unsorted. The vendor items are listed in alphabetical order, mind you... from the Japanese alphabet. This means in English and all non-Japanese versions of the game, you experience greater difficulty looking through vendors menus to find the exact thing you need. Even if you know who exactly to buy it from and where!
The Market Board lets players search directly for the items they desire, making it easier to deal with than vendors. This allows you to profit and make players' lives a bit easier without the hassle of dealing with NPC vendors.
The bronze skillet we talked about can be purchased from the vendor Syneyhil 246 gil. Instead of buying it off another server, you could just go buy it from a vendor to sell for 70k. (Often, but not always, vendor prices will be far lower than Market Board prices.)
The best vendors with the most stock are:
- Syneyhil for crafting gear at Limsa Lominsa Lower Decks (X: 6.3, Y:11.9)
- Iron Thunder for leveling armor at Limsa Lominsa Lower Decks (X: 8.1, Y: 11.6)
- Faezghim for leveling weapons at Limsa Lominsa Lower Decks (X: 6.5, Y: 11.9)
The best vendors of all are the various Housing Merchant NPCs. All housing items sell en masse — making NQ and housing items sell very well. Housing items can often sell for more than 70k. Even for items bought from vendors!
The tricky part of trading is in figuring out what to trade. The “In Demand” heart icon found next to many items on the Market Board seems like a good way to find good items to trade, but it's generally a very bad metric to use. All this icon actually does is show items that people added to their Market Board favorites list, which does not reflect the actual sales performance of the item.
Trading is a numbers game. You need raw statistics, not a mysterious icon unrelated to actual sales in order to trade properly.
This is why Saddlebag Exchange was founded!
Using the historical sales data, we calculate accurate average sale prices and sale rates. This lets you know how much items actually sell for and how often they are selling to help you find the best items to trade! We then also take many other metrics into account and provide detailed lists, filters, and links with all the information you need to master the market board!
If you are not using Saddlebag Exchange to trade, you’re seriously limiting yourself! You can view a full guide on how to use our website here in this second guide to importing, trading, and flipping.