This started as a guide on flipping, but I’ve included multiple other ways of playing the market and increasing your profits along the way. We’ll still talk about flipping first, though it is not nearly the best way to make money in this post, so strap in and enjoy the guide (get it? like ride but guide hahaha).

What is flipping?

When talking about flipping in MMOs people usually mean buying low and selling high, often on the same market/auction. In Albion you would set up a buy order, then sell whatever you get from that buy order. That’s it. The “hard” part is finding items to flip. You’ll find out that once you try, it’s not really that hard.

I haven’t done much flipping recently, but in order to give examples for this post I’ve revisited several items I’ve flipped in the past.

Here are some of my buy orders (darkened buy order is the one set up by you).

I left these sitting over night and here are the results:

That’s around 60k profit. May seem like very little, but if you have a bunch of these orders, it accumulates over time.

Finding items to flip

Now let’s try finding something new to flip. The most straight-forward way of doing it is just choosing a category (armor/melee/ranged etc) and clicking on random items, trying to find those with big difference between buy and sell orders and with jumps on the Market History graph.

You’ll be better off narrowing down the search first. We’re looking for items that get sold to buy orders more often than not. Random drops are like that. But you’ll have extreme competition on things like runes and tomes, so you’ll need to look for gear.

To narrow it further we need gear that is bought often, that would be meta gear – gear that is popular in PVP/PVE activities at the moment. If you don’t know what gear is it, you’ll just have to skip this and figure it out on your own when checking the orders. If an item is bought often it’s almost certainly meta in some part of the game.

I’ll choose T4.1 artifact equipment. It usually costs a decent amount, moves fast, is very frequently used in black zone PVP, and a lot of people sell it without looking after getting it from Hell Gates , random dungeons or ganking. I have also crafted a lot of artifact gear when I started crafting, so I’m more or less familiar with the prices and time-to-sell when it comes to it.

Let’s see here…

Not as much selling to buy orders here, I’ll just list 1. Listing 1 will also discourage others from overcutting you.

Good, next one.

These used to be really popular shortly after f2p launch. I guess people thought having two hammers was bad-ass. I thought so too. Too bad the weapon turned out to be terrible when actually used.

Volume is pretty bad but we can make some easy money here over time, very low investment too.

If you’ve read my guide on crafting and started crafting already, one easy way to start flipping is combining flipping with crafting. Flip items that you craft, as you know their price trends already and frequently set up sell orders for them anyway. Pretty much no additional research is required here.

Artifacts are another thing to flip, same reason – gets often sold without looking as it usually comes from a random drop.

This one looks alright.

We can see that people both sell to buy orders somewhat frequently and buy from sell orders.

Another example, a bit cheaper.

Last one on the list: mounts. People sell and buy mounts, especially T3-T4 horses, all the time – you’ll grab one when going ganking/HGing, and you’ll drop one if you die. I would bet T3 horse is the most common drop in PVP.

When I started playing, due to a huge influx of new players, donkeys were getting sold by the hundreds, maybe thousands per day. I made my first money flipping donkeys in Swamp Cross (buying for 2-4k, selling for 5-6k), and when I could afford a T5 Ox I started transporting them to Thetford and flipping them there as well. I’m still not sure why people bought donkeys in those numbers, but they did and I was selling them faster than I could buy them.

It turns out the donkey flipping business is still very much alive! The volume is around 500 per day, and you can make 1-1.5k per donkey, that’s not at all a bad number.

And here are the horses. 1.5-2k transactions per day, almost 3k to be made per horse flipped.

You can flip other things like Tomes Of Insight, runes, materials (.2, .3 materials often have a huge difference between buy and sell orders), trophies and so on. Just don’t forget the 3% you’re paying for listing and selling an item, as well as 1% you’re paying for listing a buy order. When the margins get low, these 4% might decide the difference between profiting and losing money.

Why not overcut by 1 silver?

By overcutting by more than a few silver we accomplish two things:

1. The people under us will think “oh he will get these 5 items and bug off, I’d rather wait it out than get into a cutting standout with him”, so less chance someone cuts above us.
2. Increasing the chance someone will sell to us. The lower the margin, the bigger the chance people will sell to the buy order. Even if most of the people who sell to us don’t even bother checking the stats and sell orders, it is still a bonus.

Combining listing just 1 item with overcutting by more than a few thousands of silver, we will rarely get overcut by others.

We’ll talk more about under- and overcutting in a separate post some time in the future. For now I’ll just say this: don’t get into cutting wars, it costs you time and money. Don’t update orders more than once per day, it is almost never worth it.

Other ways of playing the market

Plain flipping is pretty boring and usually not that profitable, let’s look at other things we can do with the market.

Salvaging artifacts

You can salvage artifacts at the Artifact Foundry. Each one will net you 75% of its Item Value stat as silver and 25% of its components (listed in the description). So 12-13 Runes/Souls/Relics of the same tier as the artifact.

The thing is not everyone knows this, so people often sell off-meta artifacts for less than they could get from salvaging them.

Let’s just choose the artifact category on the market and buy the cheapest one.

Take our artifact and head to the Artifact Foundry. It looks like this:

Second tab is salvaging:

So we got 384 silver and 12 runes, which is 384 + 105*12*0.98 = 1618 silver.

Just like that, we’ve made over 400 silver per artifact, and that is without using sell/buy orders. If you set up buy orders for these artifacts, you’ll be able to make more. It’s like flipping but with an extra step, and the good thing is that once someone sells to your buy order, selling runes afterwards is extremely easy and fast, even with a sell order.

Salvaging gear

Rarely profitable, but still an option. Same thing as with artifacts, except you do it with gear (duh) and at the Repair Station. You get 75% of the Item Value stat as silver, a chance of extracting the artifact and 25% of the resources used in crafting. I’m guessing the chance to get the artifact is 25% as well, but it would need testing to confirm.

I’m not sure if this can ever be profitable, but maybe you could find something.

Enchanting

UPDATE: This whole section is outdated, it’s pretty much always not profitable to do this since they doubled the required ammount of runes to enchant. I’ll leave it as is.

You can enchant gear at the Artifact Foundry:

It is done by using Runes/Souls/Relics of the appropriate tier. For example to enchant a T4.0 cape all the way to T4.3 cape you’ll need T4 Runes (.0 => .1), then T4 Souls (.1 => .2), then T4 Relics (.2 => .3). The amount depends on the item:

• 24 for off-hands, capes, head and leg armor.
• 48 for bags, chest armor.
• 72 for one-handed weapons.
• 96 for two-handed weapons.

The quality remains the same, which makes this pretty overpowered imo. If you see .3 Masterpiece gear, it was probably created using this method.

You can use this to buy T4.0 gear, upgrade it, then sell for more. Good example is the helmet we’ve flipped, T4.0 Graveguard: .0 costs 32k, while .1 costs 50k. We’ll only need 24 runes to upgrade it, which is less than 3k.

Another way of making money from this is enchanting high quality gear, usually excellent or masterpiece weapons/armor. Buy a T4.0 masterpiece weapon, enchant it to .2 or .3, then sell for much more. Be sure to first check if people are actually buying .2/.3 masterpieces with market history tab.

Upgrading quality

You can upgrade quality of any gear that has one (some mounts for example don’t have qualities aside from normal) at the Repair Station.

It says reroll, but the quality actually can’t go down, only up.

It will cost you a hefty sum of money, depending on the tier and enchantment level of your item. It’s not a 100% chance and it goes down the higher the quality of your item is. Upgrading from Excellent to Masterpiece is almost impossible. However, you can skip a tier, upgrading from Good to Excellent right away for example. I’ve upgraded my transport mammoth that way, got lucky and paid only 80k (4 tries) for an Excellent mammoth.

Note that this is extremely risky and rarely worth it. You’re pretty much playing a lottery and it is very easy to lose a lot of money on this. Get used to seeing this:

It took me 8 attempts to get a Good quality, then 8 more to get Outstanding, pretty unlucky and totally not worth it in this case.

I would only recommend this if you’re flipping/enchanting from .0 (you might as well first try improving the quality as the cost for .0 items is pretty low, at least until it has Good/Outstanding quality) or if you’re trying to improve the quality of an expensive mount.

NPC re-trading

The idea behind this is buying something from an NPC, then selling it on the market, or buying on the market and selling to NPCs. For example, arena rewards: buy arena sigils on the market, buy an Armored Sabertooth from the Arena Master, then sell it on the market. Salvaging artifacts is very similar to this.

If you’ve ever played Neverwinter (the MMO), it was possible to make pretty decent money from this there. People were buying tools on the marketplace for more than NPCs all over the town were selling them for, same thing with the mounts. And a lot of gear was cheaper on the marketplace than NPCs were buying it for. I’ve managed to get good mounts for all my friends in the first two days of play by abusing this.

There aren’t many NPCs who sell anything in Albion yet, but you can keep an eye out on this for the future, maybe it will become a very profitable thing to do.

Transporting

Pretty straight-forward: buy in one town, haul to another and sell there. Sometimes you can even fast travel with the items and still make good money. Transporting between royal cities is safe, there are routes using only Blue and sometimes Yellow zones. Transporting to and from Caerleon is very risky, but nets the most profit.

I won’t get too much into detail here as I’ve never really done transporting for profit yet (bad connection, I’m not trusting millions to it), but if/when I do, I’ll probably write a guide on “the safest” ways of transporting.

Lucky purchases

This is probably the least profitable (silver/hour) and stable way of playing the market, but it is fun to do from time to time, and it helps you get to know the market better.

We’re going to be looking for items that are listed for much less than they cost. How do we find them?

Open the market, then click twice on the “Duration” column. Now the most recent items will be at the top. Don’t be trigger-happy unless you are absolutely sure about the price, for now we’re just looking.

See it?

Someone probably got a lucky random drop and doesn’t want to wait for a week to sell it. It is somewhat risky buying this, but we see multiple purchases for over 800k over the weeks, so it should sell in the next few days. I’ll buy it and list at 888k.

The idea here is to get a general sense of how much what item costs. Now we know a T6.3 two-handed meta weapon is around 700-900k, and even if we don’t buy this one, next time we see someone listing a T6.3 weapon for 200-300k we’ll instantly buy it.

You’ll get better results if you narrow the search down to a category you’re interested in. If you’re crafting bows for example, you can look at recent bow listings from time to time. You can snag a few cheap bows and resell them, but most importantly you’ll get a better sense on the prices and find new bows to craft. If you see something sell for more than it costs for you to craft – here’s your new crafting item.

You should also try filtering by quality (Masterpiece is a good one to find cheap gear, enchant it and resell), tier, enchantment level (looking for cheap .2/.3 gear).

In the first week of playing I was looking at the recent sell orders, when I saw this listed at 5k silver:

Yes, 5000. I only had about 100k at the time, I double checked and bought it. Sold it for 300k after a week.

I only had about 1.5m by that time, so this was a pretty nice boost.

Another one I got recently was a Siege Ballista battle mount for 11m silver.

Sold it for 14m in trade chat in less than a minute. Could probably ask for 16m or even more, but I needed silver quick for another thing, and I still made 3m so it’s alright in my book.

Final notes

You can combine the things above, like salvaging artifacts and enchanting, transporting and npc trading, etc etc. The less you pay in market fees, the higher your profits are.

Some people may deem these activities immoral or wrong or even call them cheating. “You’re just robbing people who don’t know any better of their hard earned money!” they’ll say. And they would be wrong. The people who are selling to buy orders are paying the difference for:

1. Time. They get their money right away and don’t have to wait for their item to sell. You’re providing this service to them.
2. Lack of knowledge. If they don’t know about buy/sell orders or don’t trust themselves with setting a price that people will pay in reasonable time – they didn’t spend time finding out about it and researching it. You saved them this time, no matter how little. There is enough info in and out of the game about these things.
3. When they finally realize they’ve been wasting money for nothing, they should be glad they learned this lesson by losing money in a game and not in real life. You’ve taught them this lesson. Mistakes like missing a 0 when listing a price are also covered by this.

When it comes to making money there is no immoral way of doing it, as long as you’re not breaking the rules of the game.

As always you can contact me in game (Thulgrom), on Discord (Thulgrom#1425) or on Reddit (/u/Thulgrom).

If you want to thank me, I have 3 crafting stations (Warrior, Hunter, Mage) in Thetford, you’ll help me out by using them. If you need associate fees, just send me a mail and I’ll add you. (Outdated, don’t own any stations anymore as of 26/07)

Cheers and good luck on the markets!

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