3 Steps to make money on SWTOR's bad auction house system

If you've played Star Wars: The Old Republic for more than 10 levels, then you've probably had some experience with SWTOR's version of auction houses, the Galactic Trade Network (GTN).
And if you've had the misfortune of using this particularly nasty brand of an excuse for a MMO trading house system, then you'll certainly also have realized that using the GTN is an exercise in frustration.

The design of the GTN makes it needlessly hard to find items quickly, because you need to select several subcategories before you're even allowed to search for a specific item. And there's no quick pasting of item names into the search bar either. All search terms have to be typed in manually, which makes the whole process incredibly tedious.

Why would you make this interface that way? Why! I demand you explain yourself, BioWare!

But perhaps there is a silver lining to this particularly unpleasant case of insidious Darkside UI design.

Since it takes a long time to find what you're looking for, it's hard for people to get a good overview of what is available on the GTN and what the market price is. The result of this seems to be that a lot of people simply dump their items in the GTN at the suggested default price that the game gives them.

This price is very low, especially when you start getting credits hard and fast as you get up through the levels.
While a level 25 player may be very happy with the suggested 4.000 credits price of his 40 pieces of Lacqerous, it's an incredibly small sum of money for any level 50 player that is looking to grind up his crafting crew skills.

This presents the opportunity for entrepreneurial players to buy up items at low prices and sell them back at much higher prices for a tidy profit by following a few simple steps:

Step 1: Initial funding

Obviously you will need a bit of starting capital to get this plan underway, but I think that even 100k credits would be more than sufficient to get your own little "buy-low-sell-high" program under way.
If you're unsure of how to get 100k credits in the first place, then I'll refer you to my previous post about how I got 100k credits before level 25 (Note that prices on some items have already started to increase since I wrote that post, so you should be able to scrape together 100k credits even faster than that).

Step 2: Cornering the market and item selection

Why do you need so much cash to begin with, you ask? Why won't this just work if I spend 5.000 credits on two auctions and put them back in the GTN at a higher price?

Well, it could very well work for you, but ideally you will want to try to corner the market on the item you're buying.
So you will want to find an item where you're seeing a lot of very cheap auctions and then buy up *every single one of those cheap auctions*, thus cutting off the cheap supply for interested buyers.

If you can remove the cheap products from the market, then you will quite naturally be driving up the market price, which will of course make the supply that you have already purchased, increase in value.

This also means that you should consider what item you will try to focus your efforts on. If you're trying to raise the price of an extremely common item (say, "Desh" scavenging material, which is extremely common at low level scavenging), then you may find that your efforts get undermined by the very high supply influx into the market.

Ideally you'll want to select something that is a common enough item that there is a constant and significant demand for it, so you're sure that you can unload the products back onto the market, but also an item that has a drop rate that is low enough that there is not 100 new auctions up on the GTN every hour.





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Step 3: Break bundles for more money

While you're running around, slicing up bad guys with your lightsaber or shooting them in their ugly alien face with a trusty blaster, it's nice to keep all your materials in nice big stacks.
Inventory space is always at a premium, and having that 80 pieces of Fibermesh in one neat stack is a lot more handy than spreading it out across half your inventory space.

But when it comes to selling items on the GTN you can generally go by the old saying that "less is more".
That is, selling smaller stacks of your items is better than selling them all in one big bundle.

This is true for two reasons:

1) The GTN sorts item listings by price. 
Even if you're increasing the price x3 or x5 from what you bought the item for originally, most likely you're still going to be selling 1 piece for less than the stacks that are on sale on the GTN.

So if you buy a stack of 20 Fibermesh for 5.000 credits (which works out at 250 credits a piece) and then sell it off 1 piece at a time for 600 credits a piece (that's a tidy 140% profit), then your auctions will still show up *before* any other auctions of 20 Fibermesh for 5.000 credits, just because your price is lower.

2) By selling smaller quantities you're appealing to a wider range of sellers.
If you're only selling your items in stacks of 70 pieces, then there is going to be a lot of buyers that won't be interested in your auction because they just need 5 or 10 pieces. But if you're selling items one at a time or in smaller stacks, then you'll be able to sell both to customers that's only looking to buy a few items *and* to people that are interested in large quantities (they'll just buy a lot of your smaller stacks).

Now, I do want to say that dumping hundreds of 1 piece auctions of stackable items on the GTN is considered spamming and bad manners by some players, so try not to be a complete A-hole about it and keep your 1 piece auctions down to a reasonable level, unless you have no scruples about being considered the scourge of the GTN.


If you follow these steps then you should be well on your way to making a pretty penny to spend on skimpily clad Twi'leks or illicit death sticks (just don't let those righteous Jedi catch you).

These steps are really universally applicable on all MMO auction houses, but the way that SWTOR's trade network makes finding pricing information such a hassle, it should provide a better opportunity to use these steps to accrue a nice little stash of credits.

Have fun on the GTN and remember the words of Gordon Gekko: "Greed is good".



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