Merchanting guide

From the RuneScape Wiki, the wiki for all things RuneScape

Merchanting, or arbitrage, is the act of purchasing an item at a low price and then selling that item at a higher price, generating profit as the difference between the above unit prices. Merchanting was a popular method used by players to accumulate a significant amount of wealth in a relatively short time. The amount of time spent depends on the supply and demand of the item, similar to the situations in real-world economy. Prices of some items fluctuate rapidly. However, merchanting has became much less common since the addition of the grand exchange and the removal of unbalanced trade. This is due to the fact that many people believe that it is impossible to make large amounts of money any more. However, this is completely untrue. Merchanting is still a good way of making money for players that know how.

[edit] How to Merchant

This may be the graph trend you would be looking for if you wanted to merchant a good item. However, in the case of dragon claws, they were completely bought out at this time, and worth nearly 100M on the street, far more than their actual equilibrium price, so were not actually a good merchanting item.

One method of merchanting is to buy items in bulk at the Grand Exchange that are currently going up in price or that you predict will be going up in price. This is sometimes called "investing" rather than merchanting. It is important to be careful buying items that have been going up in price for a long time, as price increases are usually followed by price decreases, and vice versa. Carefully watch the prices of the item and sell them when the price starts going down or stays even. Ideally you would actually sell while the item is still going up in price, the day before the price reverses and item starts going down in price. However, it is not always easy to predict exactly when this will be. Players may want to use the RuneScape Grand Exchange on the Runescape website. Players may find the Grand Exchange Market Watch helpful, although the Grand Exchange Database can be even more helpful, and the prices are always up to date.

Another good way to invest is to read the Runescape news found in the homepage of the website, and look for new updates. For example, the release of pvp worlds resulted in increased demand for sharks, swordfish, runite items, dragon daggers, Dragon scimitars, and other popular player-killing equipment and supplies. If, before the update, you had seen this coming and stocked up on these items, you would have made quite a substantial amount of cash from the items raising. Another good example is rares. Before the holidays, people like to buy Santa hats. They will almost always go up in price in the weeks leading up to Christmas. Richer people will buy some of these, and sell them once they go up. However, due to a popular perception that Santa hats would be worth the most on Christmas, Santa hats have been known to crash before Christmas. In 2008, Santa hats started crashing several days before Christmas.

Yet another way is buying things that are in high demand on the grand exchange for medium or lowest price. Players then can wait a few hours and they will be able to resell these at highest price because players want them so bad. Things that may work well for this are Mithril bolts or Rune arrows. Taking glory amulets and charging them can also prove a good source of money.

[edit] Suggestions for Grand Exchange Merchanting

Although it may seem impossible, merchanting on the Grand Exchange can actually earn you large amounts of money fairly quickly. In fact, many of the richest players in RuneScape have made most of their money from merchanting on the Grand Exchange.

Items that players may find good to merchant:

Steel bars: Buy them for market price (or slightly below market price), then resell them at slightly below maximum price, or wait for them to go up a bit. Do not try to sell them at the maximum price or they will probably not sell. Keep this up until you get rich enough to invest more expensive items to increase your profit.

Runes: Buy runes such as air, water, nature or law. Buy any of these runes in bulk for lowest price. Then sell for market price. Be aware that some runes, such as air runes, have a very small price fluctuation (usually 1 coin) , so you must trade in huge volumes, like 50,000 runes to make a profit. This method can be a lot faster than other methods, but with low amounts of cash, it can have small results.

Lobsters: Buy them for market price, or lowest price, then sell them for the maximum price. This way can be more profitable than using runes, but you need at least 100,000 coins to start and it takes longer to do. Note that this also works well with swordfish, as they are in high demand for F2P pkers.

Barrows equipment: Look at what's going up, and buy it. Then, sell it once the price seems to not be going up anymore. This can be done with any item, but the price of Barrows items often fluctuates greatly. This way can get you quick results, and will generally earn you a lot of money. The only problem for this is you need a few million coins to start it, and it can be very easy to mess up and lose a great deal of money.

Flax: The price of flax (81) seems to go in cycles that lasts several weeks or more. You can buy them when the market value is 83 or 84 coins each (or try buying them for the min for under 80) and then once the price rises such that the max price hits about 95 or 96, unload them for the max. Once the max price hits 98 or so, they will stop selling and begin to go back down. This may not seem like much, but it's a 10% profit or more. The key here is not to make a huge profit all at once, but a continual small profit that will repeat over and over, forever.

Watch items of the Grand Exchange Database under the most price raise category, then buy them and once they stop going up sell them. However, be aware that there are price manipulation clans which will artificially try to raise the price of certain items. They will continually buy a nearly worthless item, such as bronze pickaxe, until the price goes way up, then they will all dump it at once, causing the price to crash. When they crash happens you will have no advance notice and you will be unable to unload your items even at minimum as the market will already be flooded with thousands of items from the clan. Be aware of this and when you see a common item going way up for no discernible reason, be very cautious in investing in it.

Using these methods, it is easy to get a lot of money in a very short period of time. However, if you are thinking of investing a large sum of your cash, it may be worth it to research the general price that most of the items will stop going up or going down at. If you don't you may be at risk to lose large sums of money. Remember, you want items that are in good supply, not rares. You want items that players commonly use or consume, such as food, armour, weapons, and items needed for raising skills, such as metal bars for smithing.
You also want to find items that are in your price range. If you only have 100k to invest on an item, you probably don't want to pick an item that is 50K (unless it looks REALLY GOOD), as you would only be able to buy 2 of them. Instead pick items that are about 250-500 coins, that way you could buy up to 2000-4000 of them. Quantity is usually more important than price, but not always. If your investing funds are low, it is best to focus on quantity, then as your investing funds rise, focus on quality, such as high level armour, or weapons, or rares.
Pay attention to the charts, they are EXTREMELY valuable. How to find the charts: Go to the Runescape Home page. Click on the menu bar "Game Guide", then click on "Grand Exchange". Bookmark this page in your browser, it will serve you well in the future. This is your home base for merchanting. You can see which items are going up in price, and which are going down. Type in an item, such as "Law Rune" in the search box, then hit "Go." You will get a list of items which either have "law" or "rune" in the item name. Click on "Law Rune" which should be at the top of the list. The first chart you will see is the 7 day chart, hit the button at bottom right marked "30 Days". This will give you an overview of how the price has been increasing or decreasing over the past 30 days.
Using the charts you can usually predict which items will be increasing in price, and which will continue to fall. Be aware that many items will rise and fall repeatedly within a certain range, so the graph will look like a wave. These items are especially valuable as merchanting items, as they are somewhat predictable. You want to buy right at the bottom of the wave, and sell at the top. Looking at the last 30 days on the chart should give you an excellent idea of where the buy and sell point will be. Be aware that one item is the daily price, the other lines are averages, so you can tell what the average price is over the last 7 days, compared to todays price, or the average of the last 30 days. These average lines are important to spot trends in the items price behaviour.
Another important concept is DIVERSIFICATION! Do not put all your money on one item. If it drops in price, you are in trouble. Try to pick four to six good items (you may have to experiment to find four good ones) and just keep buying low, and selling high. Remember there are always impatient players who get rare items as a drop, such as corrupt dragon items, and they need cash fast, so they will sell for the minimum. That is great for you as you can buy cheap. Then later will come the impatient buyer, who HAS to have that item right away and is willing to pay top dollar. Great for you also. You will be able to be patient and buy cheap, then you will also be patient and sell high. That is the key to merchanting, patience. Waiting for the right seller to come along, then once you have a good stock of the items, waiting until the right buyer comes along. Patience is everything. However, if you find the right items, you should be able to buy some and resell the same items within 24 hours. If you can't buy a supply of your merchanting item within 12 hours, you probably should pick another item, or rethink your price. Same goes for selling, If you can't unload the supply of items within 12 hours, your price is probably too high, or the demand is falling.
Trial and error will let you know what the right price points are. Sometimes you can offer a single item at max, if it doesn't sell, cancel and re-offer at a lower price. Repeat until you find a price that the item moves easily. Re-offer all your stock at that price. You have to balance speed and profit. Sometimes it is better to sell something for slightly above market price in one hour than wait 12 hours to sell them all at max price. Remember, the key is profit per hour. If you can move more items quicker, you might make more money even though it's a smaller profit on each individual item. Ever wonder why stores have big sales? This is why.
Jagex has put a 4 hour delay window in place to combat merchanting. If you buy an item, you will have to wait 4 hours before you resell it. Do not freak out, once again your patience will be rewarded. You will find that your items will move once the 4 hour delay is up.
Also be aware that it takes 5 to 10 minutes for the Runescape worlds to talk to one another, so if you offer an item in world 1 on Grand Exchange, there may be a buyer right away in world 70, but you won't complete the transaction until about 10 minutes later when world 1 Grand Exchange "talks" to world 70 Grand Exchange. Once again, patience is the key.
If you buy an item and find the price drops and you cannot resell it, you can either hang on it until the price rises again, or dump it at minimum. If you choose your items carefully, this shouldn't happen to you very often. A wise rule is to always do a test buy of a small quantity, and then resell to see how quickly the item moves. If you can buy ten easily, then sell ten easily, next time try to buy 50/sell 50, then try to buy 250/sell 250. Never start out buying a huge quantity of an untested item.

[edit] Armour Set Merchanting

Note: to do this most effectively you may find it beneficial to have enough money for a few of the sets that you are thinking of merchanting. Please note that it can still work with one set, although you may not make as much money.

To start off, go to the Grand exchange database on [1].
Next, search for a few of the sets that interest you or are in your price range.
After that, you will want to find one that is going up. This will be your target set.

For F2P players or people with less than 700k:

Rune Armour sets

Image	Item	Price	Direction	L. Alch.	H. Alch.	Store			Days	Last updated
	Rune armour set (l)	155,100				Not sold	edit	history	1	15:00, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

Adamant gold-trimmed armour sets

Image	Item	Price	Direction	L. Alch.	H. Alch.	Store			Days	Last updated
	Adamant gold-trimmed armour set (l)	497,100					edit	history	1	15:00, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

Adamant trimmed armour sets

Image	Item	Price	Direction	L. Alch.	H. Alch.	Store			Days	Last updated
	Adamant trimmed armour set (l)	229,300					edit	history	1	15:00, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

Black gold-trimmed armour sets

Image	Item	Price	Direction	L. Alch.	H. Alch.	Store			Days	Last updated
	Black gold-trimmed armour set (l)	735,000					edit	history	1	15:00, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

Black trimmed armour set

Image	Item	Price	Direction	L. Alch.	H. Alch.	Store			Days	Last updated
	Black trimmed armour set (l)	261,700					edit	history	1	15:00, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

For F2P players or people with more than 1m:

Guthix Armour Sets

Image	Item	Price	Direction	L. Alch.	H. Alch.	Store			Days	Last updated
	Guthix armour set (l)	1,600,000					edit	history	11	16:47, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Saradomin Sets

Image	Item	Price	Direction	L. Alch.	H. Alch.	Store			Days	Last updated
	Saradomin armour set (l)	3,700,000					edit	history	2	12:13, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Zamorak Sets

Image	Item	Price	Direction	L. Alch.	H. Alch.	Store			Days	Last updated
	Zamorak armour set (l)	2,600,000					edit	history	4	17:32, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Rune Gold-Trimmed armour sets

Image	Item	Price	Direction	L. Alch.	H. Alch.	Store			Days	Last updated
	Rune gold-trimmed armour set (l)	1,800,000					edit	history	4	22:47, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Rune Trimmed Sets

Image	Item	Price	Direction	L. Alch.	H. Alch.	Store			Days	Last updated
	Rune trimmed armour set (l)	1,200,000					edit	history	5	6:08, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

For P2P players with any amount of cash:

Any Barrows sets

Item	Price	L. Alch.	H. Alch.	Store			Days	Last updated
Dharok's set	5,800,000			Not sold	edit	history	2	12:13, 2 July 2009 (UTC)
Torag's set	1,700,000			Not sold	edit	history	2	12:13, 2 July 2009 (UTC)
Verac's set	3,700,000			Not sold	edit	history	1	15:00, 3 July 2009 (UTC)
Ahrim's set	2,700,000			Not sold	edit	history	1	15:00, 3 July 2009 (UTC)
Karil's set	2,200,000	8	12	Not sold	edit	history	1	15:00, 3 July 2009 (UTC)
Guthan's set	4,000,000			Not sold	edit	history	1	15:00, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

Any F2p Armour Sets listed above

See above

Splitbark sets

Image	Item	Price	Direction	L. Alch.	H. Alch.	Store			Days	Last updated
	Splitbark armour set	104,800				77,000	edit	history	1	15:00, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

Infinity Sets

Image	Item	Price	Direction	L. Alch.	H. Alch.	Store			Days	Last updated
	Infinity robes set	2,800,000					edit	history	1	15:00, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

Now this is where it gets tricky!

If all or most of the parts of the set are going up, then it is probably a good idea to continue along down this page. If the set you are going to choose looks mostly like this:

Ahrim's armour set went up 3000 coins
Ahrim's Hood went down 1000 coins
Ahrim's Robe skirt went up 2000 coins
Ahrim's Staff went down 500 coins
Ahrim's Robe top went up 1500 coins

Then do this:

Buy the set and exchange at normal price it in the Grand Exchange.
Exchange the box for components.
Sell the items that went down 100 coins below the Normal price.
Sell the items that went up 1000 coins below the highest price.
Wait One - Four hours and buy them back. You should make a value of 5000 coins or higher depending on how much the set is.

You can also do this:

Buy all the components at medium price on the Grand Exchange.
Exchange the set for the component pieces.
Sell all the pieces for medium or highest price, depending on which ones are going up.

Note: If F2P, then use your two Grand Exchange slots to sell the items that were going up in price first. Then sell the ones that went down in value.

[edit] Tips and tricks

Patience - Players must have patience if they want to merchant. It might be a long time before someone will buy or sell the item you are merchanting. Do not freak out if the item does not sell or buy instantly.

Also, note that you cannot resell/rebuy an item immediately after buying/selling it. This restriction is to reduce the chance for players to manipulate prices. This waiting period is 4 hours long.

Additionally, if you have an open buy order for 1000 law runes, and you also have a sell order for 500 law runes, if you placed the buy order first, the sell order will not even begin to execute until 4 hours after the buy order was completed or cancelled. Therefore, buying and selling the same item at the same time is not recommended.

Also, there are quantity caps on certain items. You may find that your buy order for 5000 battlestaffs stops after 100 or 1000 regardless of the offer price. If that happens, you have hit the quantity cap and will have to wait four hours to buy more.

Players should be wary of players trading them, attempting to sell an item that is drastically dropping in price. Always check the Grand Exchange chart for that item before purchasing directly from a player.

It may be better to merchant when you have back-up and constant advice of what to buy. Joining a merchanting Clan Chat can result in get free merchanting advice and help in finding out what to merchant. However, be aware that some clans are simply trying to use you to help manipulate prices so the leadership can profit. Do not take their advice blindly. Always do your own research and watch the action on your items carefully.

Try to exchange your goods for cash only, unless it is a good deal for you. If you always trade your goods for "junk" items, you then have to sell the junk item you get, and sometimes in this process you lose money. If someone can't afford an item in cash, you probably shouldn't sell it to them.

While you are merchanting, you can spend your idle time training a skill. This way you can make money from merchanting and from the skill. Some good money making skills are:

Killing green dragons and selling hides and bones
Making oak planks.
For high level players; Barrows
High-alching items to train magic
Lighting fires at the Grand Exchange to train Firemaking
Cooking food (on the fires that the guys in the line above lit) to train your Cooking

For free-to-play:

Cutting and selling yews.
Killing Hill Giants and selling good drops and bones.
Mining clay is always good money for lower levels.

Make sure that you are observing the price of your chosen item. If the price suddenly dips, it can potentially cost thousands of coins if you were not aware until it was too late.

Never buy a large quatity of items and bank then then forget about them. It is okay to keep items for a long time if you are sure the price will rise, but check the price every day so you can be aware of any discrepencies. If the price unexpectedly starts to drop, you can sell the item and prevent drastic losses.

[edit] Potion Decanting

The Method

Bob Barter, the potion decanter and herb expert of the Grand Exchange

Potion decanting is a great way of merchanting for the lower levels. In fact, you don't need any levels at all to use this method for making money! The basics of decanting is turning an item into another one which could sell for a greater value than its component parts e.g. Buying three potions of one dose tends to cost the same as buying one potion of three doses.

One example of a potion to decant would be the Antifire potion: Buy a set (at the mid price or lower) of, let's say 100 Antifire potion(3). Go to the Grand Exchange, and go to the South-west corner where Bob Barter is. Right click him, and select "decant". He will then turn all 1, 2, and 3 does potions into the 4 dose versions of each. This is essentially him using them all with each other, like players had to do before. Once you do this with several inventories of potions you will end up with 75 Antifire potion(4), which you then sell for a price higher than the component parts (in this example above the mid price). You don't make great profit out of this merchanting method in small amounts, but if the demand is there you will proportionally increase your profits the more you invest.

Suggested potions

[edit] Clan "merchanting"

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It is worth noting that on June 8th, 2009, Jagex locked the clan chats of several well known merchanting clans, taking a somewhat firm stance against this form of merchanting, although no clear statements were made.

One of the easiest, and occasionally risky, "merchanting" strategies is called group- or clan-merchanting. This is not actually "merchanting", but rather collusion, which is illegal when done in the real world.

The way this works is that a large group of players conspire to buy as many of a single item as possible, causing the price to rise over the course of several days. The players then sell back the item at the inflated price, resulting in huge potential profits.

While this collusion is a form of price manipulation and therefore may technically be against the rules, Jagex has not yet made a formal statement against it. In fact, with many players publicly advertising merchanting clans at the Grand Exchange every day, it appears that Jagex is ignoring this activity.

Mod Samantha states that merchanting clans are within the rules, but mentions that claimed profits are greatly exaggerated.

Mod Samantha mentions that only the leaders of merchanting clans ultimately profit.

Advantages	Disadvantages
The potential profits range into the millions. This is relatively easy, requiring only patience and attention to prices. Not much money is needed to start out with (only about 500k).(*If you start with 50k you can make 500k through small scale merchanting and then use 500k to start larger scale.) Clan merchanting raises prices far more than any player could ever possibly do alone, allowing for greater profits.	The player missing the right time to sell, thereby losing money as the item's price plummets The clan leaders lying to their followers and selling out early, thus crashing the item before the others have a chance to sell it Your group buying the item right before another group sells out, thus losing millions. (It should be noted that clan leaders usually check other merchanting clan chats, thus making this very unlikely.) Posting threads on the RuneScape forums to manipulate prices is against the rules and may result in a ban from the forums. Starting May 11, 2009, If you receive a ban or mute in-game, this will also prevent you from using the forums. Equally, if you receive a forum ban, you’ll be muted in-game.[2] Naturally, the clan leaders make far more profit than any member does because they can stock up on an item because it is announced to the clan. In some of the least trustworthy clans, clan leaders may begin selling their item for maximum price as soon as they announced it to the clan, thus taking advantage of their members.

In spite of these risks, clan merchanting can be a very good way to make money, especially if you already have a decent amount to invest. However, the risks can be potentially disastrous, so paying close attention to prices and playing RuneScape regularly are important. Also, make sure that you can trust the merchanting clan you join. If the clan keeps "dumping" early, then never invest any money into that clan. If you aren't sure about the clan, do not immediately invest all of your hard-earned cash.

[edit] Trivia

Due to recent news, merchanting clans could be at risk as Jagex could put in a no merchant clan rule. One of RuneScape's most popular merchanting clans named Goldmerch was banned. The item they were merchanting was also manually stopped.