Why I hate flippers...

I love flippers.

They teach me to correctly price my items. When I see one of my items go 30-60min after I put it up, I can be pretty sure I mispriced it and should've asked more. I check the stats of the item in my shop/procurement, check prices again on poe.xyz, and remember for the next time that items with similar stats should be priced higher.

It kinda annoys me when a good item I put up too cheap doesn't sell quickly, because it makes me think that perhaps the item wasn't that good at all and that I perhaps need to revise my prices lower. If it weren't for flippers I'd be making a lot more stupid pricing mistakes that would probably cost me more in the end than what I lost for putting up a few items too cheaply.

They are market makers and provide the market with both a bid and ask price for nearly every item. If you want to sell something fast, you can probably do so by selling it cheap to a flipper. Flippers buy with the intention to sell, and having money stuck in items that don't sell is a waste of resources. Thus, they prefer to sell fast, just under market average, which keeps prices in check. Because items are more easily tradeable, they are a very liquid store of value. If you're ever in need of some extra ex to quickly snap up a bargain, you can easily sell off a few items fast.

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Fatalflaw a écrit :

The sad part is you look at what he is really doing here, just trolling indexing sites and snatching up any semi decent gear they can get at a low price, to re-sell for exalts. It severely hurts newer players by making it nearly impossible for them to find a decent upgrade at a fair price. I mean look at what he was trying to get off of me:

Why does a guy with all of that GG/Legacy need a mediocre dagger, if not to sell it at 10 times what he paid to some noob?

seriously why anyone would pay more than 1alch for that dagger ? am i missing something?

pc?

The flippers, I mean people defending flipping and scamming, are making invalid comparisons to real life economics.


Real life stores provide actual services to customers through logistics, moving goods, purchasing from manufacturers in bulk and distributing these goods.

Are logistics required in PoE? Not unless you count the waypoint in A3m to A1n
-The flipper has not performed and function to benefit the consumer.


Flippers sell through PoE.xyz as much as anyone else. It is no easier to find an item from them than it is from the original owner.
-Once again the flipper has not provided a valuable service, or any service different from the original owner.

The liquidity myth
Liquidity is somewhat valid when you are impatient and need to change currency,
-In this limited instance the flipper has provided a service and deserves their 1-2 chaos profit.

This does not work with weapons, armor, or uniques. As I illustrated.. they use any means to lowball items, then force the actual end customer to pay many times over a fair* rate.

Fair implies a rate which aligns with the scarcity* and demand for an item.

Scarcity implies the number of items in circulation when items are not methodically bought to be monopolized and price fixed.
-For reference look into the mirror price fixing fiasco when players systematically bought them and the price doubled.

In an effort to reduce the 'economics' talk and put it into more realistic POE perspective, lets flip this around (pun not intended) and look at it from the perspective of trying to collaborate with a flipper.

If the flipper is beneficial to you as both a buyer and a seller, then you should be able to negotiate some win/win situation with them.

So what can a flipper do for you?

As a seller

More people can see their items more:

Maybe you are not ranked enough to show up as 'online' on poeis and hence miss out on a lot of the market when you put items on your shop. There may be certain items that you are happy to pay someone with 'online' access to sell for you.

They know the fair price of items:

You do not know the market enough to know the value of items, in particular rares. (Think about all the 'price checks' that occur on global chat!) You should be happy to pay a service fee for someone to tell you the price of things - depending on the reliability of that person.

They help you manage the 'selling process':

You do not want to play a 'trading game' and rather drop your random items off and go kill some more stuff. You should be happy for someone to 'manage' the selling of your items for you.

As a buyer

They help you manage the 'buying process'

You have an item you want to buy. It might not be very common, you might want specific links and colors etc. You may be willing to pay someone to help you hunt down that item (poeis helps) but more importantly being online as the seller of that item so you can make the actual trade.



So it does seem like there is value for this shopping assistant (flipper).

Then why the negativity?

1. The person re-sells it instantly at a higher price. Well hang on here.. you got your currency instantly, while this person now has to sit around and wait for a buyer. That's the price to pay.

2. The person re-sells it for 30x the price. OK this guy is obviously an unreliable source of price checking. Unfortunately they exists and in a transactional world (they only plan on dealing with you once) - its in their best interest to rip you off. Maybe what you can do is find/build relationships with more reliable shop assistants?

3. You actually wanted an item but someone bought it before you... and now is offering to sell to it at a higher price. Unfortunately for you, they were more available than you and paid more attention to the shops or trade chat. At the very least you can now get the item instantly (for the higher price).

4. The flippers are buying out all of (x) item! there is none of the market and they are now selling them at a billion Exs!. I would put these people in a different category (price fixers?). Yes they are bad for the economy. These guys aren't really helping with the liquidity/fair pricing anymore.

5. Ok, I agree that there is value and i should pay a bit extra, but I'm paying way too much!. Unfortunately, GGG decided on deliberately making trading such a big hassle. The bigger the hassle, the more value these 'services' are worth. If there was a AH, the buy/sell gap of items from flippers would be reduced.



PS. Btw, you can genuinely try to build these relationships with flippers. By doing so, you reduce the uncertainty in reliability factor, it will be beneficial for you too.

Yes, build relationships with flippers! Let them actually play the game as it supposed to be played - with constant rerols one crazy fun expensive buidl after another another- while you just muck about with mediocre ones. But fear not, by letting them have all the resourses of the game it profits you! How you ask? It just does!! Yeah!

People crying about item flipping are so clueless. People playing "merchant" is nothing new. It exists in every game that has trading and the real world. It is NOT specific to poe or more common in poe.

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Xavderion a écrit :

I already adressed the issue where in a slow market, you have to sit on your items for a much longer time, which leaves you without currency to participate on the market

As said, that mainly only affects sellers; a buyer can only 'profit' from decreased time to catch his deal, for the additional fee the flipper(s) charge him. This gets more worse, as less the tradig base in the sellers/buyers timezone is (affects both with the chance to make a 'direct deal')

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malvar a écrit :

You sell item A to a flipper for a bit more than you'd get from a normal player, then you buy item B from another flipper for a lot more than you'd pay to a normal player.
In the end, you lose and the flippers win.

Methods like flipping never(!) really help the economy no matter whether we are talking about a game or real life.

just this.

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stormyknight a écrit :

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majesw a écrit :

Wow... People still think flipping is a bad thing...
Stunning... Absolutely stunning...

Yep its utterly retarded, this is a free market either participate or do not.

ANYONE whining about "flippers" must be incredibly insecure and overly sensitive to the actions of others in which case i think you would benefit NOT playing games with online interaction with other people and free markets.

Its not a "free market" - its much more like a spot market where the fastest dealer makes the catch, and from the view of ANYone who tries to PLAY the progress way of the game, others that (can) focus mainly/total on that trading business (as pure middlesmen) are just the CANCER...

'Middlesmen' add NOTHING to the market but a slightly increased accessibility of items that are already there (maybe some would not be real part of the market, but thats not the point here)

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habkor a écrit :

An example why flipping tends to increase efficiency:

You find item X. You do not need X. The going rate ("market price") for X is 30 Chaos, but it could take a very long while to find a buyer who needs exactly X at this point.

Yes, middlesmen can increase some efficiency of selling, indeed.
But: if X is very common/on high demand, you will find someone seeking it fast 'enough'. If not, it either has a (much?) lower real/effective value, or its too specific to just announce it in the tradechannel. There's a reason why also some trading forums exist ^^ (But using these decreases the 'efficiency' of selling, of course.... sometimes trading is a hard business... ^^

I give you an (extreme) conter-example, why its shitty as it is now:
I need X, and X has an "initial" value of 5 chaos, and X is somewhat rare... Now we assume, I have an average ingame availability of 4 hours per day, and we assume, for the example, everybody else have the same, each on his own timezone: that gives 6 timeslots without overlap, but as we have to meet, that would not working - an effective overlap of 1 hour on each slot makes it 8 slots...
If, for the worst case, we have the maximum slot difference between the initial seller of X and me, it would need 6 middlesmen to transport X to my slot, which ALL will make their profit, any may not just charge an additional C. Do you really want to pay 20C for an item that you could get for 5 - if you had the luck that you match the "right" timeslot, OR IF WE WOULD NOT NEED to care about timeslots at ALL?