Thread: Flip Merchanting Guide

Flip Merchanting Guide
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What Is Flip Merchanting?

Flip merchanting (or flipping) is a method of merchanting where you buy an item or multiple items with the sole intention of quickly reselling them - within a few days but usually immediately. The point is to buy the item for the lowest possible price on the GE and then sell it for the highest that it can be sold for immediately or at least very quickly.

What Are The Requirements?

1. A brain
2. A decent amount of GP, the more the merrier

How Do I Find A Good Item To Flip?

It's impossible to be able to just 'know' what items are good to flip, but usually if they're well-traded items they can be counted on. Check Runescape's GE page to find the most traded items. DO NOT pick anything from the top 5, but below that should be good. Click here: RuneScape - Grand Exchange

After a bit of searching you should be able to find an item you can flip. Think about the following things before attempting to flip an item:

1. Do people want this item?
2. Is there a lot of them in circulation? (refer to GE link above)
3. Is there a decent amount of demand? (otherwise flipping could take hours or even days - not for amateurs)

For this guide I'll be flipping the Rune Scimitar as an example.

Finding The Sell Price

Now you need to find your sell price for the item you're flipping. Try to buy the item at +5% the guide price. If it doesn't purchase instantly keep going up in increments of 5% until it does. Once your item has purchased, write down the EXACT number it bought for. You can find this above the green bar at the bottom of the GE screen where it says 'for a total price of ____ gp'. This will be your selling price, use it well young padawan.

What does this do? Well, basically it finds the lowest sell offer on the GE for your item. If your item is buying instantly at guide price or below guide price you should immediately abort it as you won't be able to make profit from it and the price of it is probably going down in the future as well. Find a new item.

I purchased the Rune Scimitar for 15,200 GP:

Attachment 702

Finding The Buy Price

You're well on your way to doing your first successful flip. You need to find your buying price now. This is the price you're going to buy your items for so that you can sell it at your sell price (duh) for profit. For this step do the opposite of what you did while finding the sell price. Go down in increments of -5% until your item sells. Once again, write down the sell price. If your item doesn't sell, or it sells for 0.5% less than the sell price you should abort this item, it probably won't be making you much money.

I sold my Rune Scimitar for 15,100 gp. 100 gp profit per Scimitar!:

Attachment 703

Oh No! I'm An Idiot And Forgot To Write Down My Buy/Sell Prices!

Not to worry, young idiot. Simply check your Grand Exchange history and you should see how much you bought the item for and how much you sold it for. Life = saved. It'll look like this:

Attachment 704

Buying Items

Now that you've done your buy and sell price tests, it's time to make some profits. Place an offer in the GE for your item at your buy price. Buy as many of them as you're comfortable with. Note that while flip merchanting is less risky than most methods, there's still risk involved and if you lose 800m because you bought a crap-ton of feathers and tried to flip them unsuccessfully don't blame me.

If after 5-10 minutes you don't get all of your items, you can either raise your offer *slightly* or go do another test buy and sell. The GE changes fast. If your test comes up with failed results pick a new item and go back to step one.

*note* Like I said, prices fluctuate quickly. My sell price ended up being 15,349 and my buy price 15,210. That's actually good because I'm making over 100gp profit per Scimitar now. The Scimitars took me about four minutes to buy. Here's the result:

Attachment 705

Profit - Finally!

Once you've got all of your items sell them for your sell price. This may also take a bit of time (5-10 minutes usually). If you haven't sold a lot of your items slightly lower your offer, it's likely that someone else merchanting the same item is trying to outdo you. Keep trying until you've sold your items. Profit! Yay!

The 20 Rune Scimitars were put up for sale for 15,349gp however I didn't sell a single one for about three minutes so I decided to follow my own advice and slightly lower the price to 15,310. This will still ensure a 100gp profit per scimitar. Anyways 100gp*20=2000gp. That's 2,000gp profit in a matter of minutes.

Attachment 706

obviously that isn't that great but it was done with only a 300k capital. If you had, say, a 30m capital (I personally have about 60m for merchanting) then that's 2000 Rune Scimitars. 100gp*2000=200k in a few minutes. Pretty good.

There are better items for this too, I just quickly though of Rune Scimitars as an example. Anyways, go out there and flip! And enjoy your GP too.



Update: Added screenies and an example (rune scims)

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