The Neopet Primer II: Making The Second Million!
Oct 13 '04
The Bottom Line Sloth rules, get over it.
Having a successful shop at Neopets is one of the many ways to increase your NP, neopoints, but where oh where do you get those items? Sure you can hit the shops to buy weapons, food, books and clothing to stock in your shop but unless you know the current market value for items, you could be getting ripped off. Yes indeed, there are some items that you just don’t buy from the shops – and those are usually the items that you see lingering after a restock. Each section has them; in Faerie Books you'll find "Breathe", in the main food shop you’ll see gruel items and the bakery always seems to have the basket of bread up for grabs. So, how does this happen? Well, people tend to stock up on the half off sale that happens on the third of every month; items are sold at half price and while it is tricky to get some of the more popular items, it's pretty much a safe bet than anything you see in a shop is going to make you money. The exception is weapons, there are some that are just so overpriced that they sit there .. in the shop .. never getting purchased. This is where it pays off to do some research and see what things are selling for on The Shop Wizard; this is also a common newbie mistake – looking at the estimated value of an item on the lookup. If you do that you are going to price berries in the thousands and chocolates that sell for an incredible amount of NP for around 200.
So, How Do You Really Make NP?
I’ve been a member of the site for a while now but I don’t claim to be an expert, and I never will. No matter how long I am at the site, there will always be people who have more experience and more knowledge. All I can do is pass on what I’ve learned through trial and error and hopefully allow you to escape some of the embarrassing moments I’ve had. One thing that is extremely helpful in making NP is to know what items are retired [look in your inventory or safety deposit box, items that are retired will be labeled as such] – if you can find a book or food that’s been recently retired, you can stock up on them when the price is still low and affordable. A great example of this is the book Neofashion. One day it was selling for about 1,000 NP and the next it was selling at over ten thousand. I was clueless as to why the price jumped so much and was kicking myself for having sold off the ones that I had. The selling price of the book seemed to fluctuate and dipped under a thousand a lot – so I figured I better get rid of them. That was before I learned that some retired items only increase in value and those are the items that can only be used once before they disappear from your inventory – mainly books and food. You can also profit from being the first to get new items like books – there are a ton of book collectors out there that are always looking to move up the ranks so if they have to pay 75,000 NP for a book to get a trophy or bump someone down the list – that’s a small price to pay. But don’t hold on to those books for long. I made the mistake of buying the "1,001 Lava Recipes" book for 20,000 NP when it was first released thinking that it was rare and the price would stay stable, now you can get them for under 1,000 NP. Again, a hard lesson to learn but once you do this you stop and think before making that hasty purchase.
Advent calendar items are always a great investment. These were items that were given out during the month of December and ranged from Snowy Petpet Paint Brushes to food items. There were also a few books given out including the very cute “Walking Book”. I saw one of these in someone’s shop for 100 NP and bought it without knowing what it was worth. After that, and the Neofashion fiasco, I started stocking up on them before they were retired and the price started to go up. “Seasonal Faerie Tales” is another one to be on the look out for. Contrary to what some people say, titles like “Book of Swords”, “Tournament Handbook” and “GoGoGo Handbook” are not books that were handed out from the advent calendar but obtained through other means [termuclous]. These are listed as “special” items meaning they can’t be purchased from a shop but can be had through other events at the site. More often than not, you can find these books selling for an extremely low price or an extremely high price. If that sounds confusing, here is an example. When you first join the site you are given a newbie pack that contains a weapon, book, toy and piece of food. The structure of these changed recently and the “bar of chocolate” was replaced with “mashed potato and gravy, “The Magic Paw” swapped with “Mystery of The Kourga Paw” and so on. Until this happened, you could find “The Magic Paw” selling for about 100 – 200 NP, now the price has jumped to 300 NP and while that might not sound like a lot, it is a good indication that the price will only continue to increase until it is retired. This isn’t listed as a “special” book and can be purchased in the shop however since the market is flooded with people who have the book in inventory, no one purchased it for 800 NP from the book store. This offers the long term member a great opportunity; you can buy hundreds of copies of the book and sell them off little by little as the price increases or hold out until it is retired and really make a killing.
So how do you find these items if they are retired? The Shop Wizard is the best place to start but I will tell you this, some of my greatest finds have been looking in shops for other items or just dumb luck. While it may seem slightly cruel, you can usually find some of the best deals in the newbie shops; these are people who just joined the site and aren’t familiar with how to price things correctly. But that doesn’t mean that user error doesn’t come into play; I found a petpetpet in a shop for 15 NP one time and a Babaa for 200 NP – on the same token I mispriced things and sold them for a lot less than what they were selling for – usually because I didn’t add an extra zero at the end of the price. I felt like kicking myself when I checked my sales history and saw that I priced a Babaa at 1,500 instead of 15,000. But eventually I got over it and chalked it up as lesson learned the hard way. When you are scouting the Shop Wizard for low priced items, if you come across something that is really under priced it is always a good idea to check out the other items the person is selling because there is a good chance that you’ll be able to find other bargains. Occasionally you can get a retired item from a random event but if memory serves me, the only thing I ever got that was retired was an Icy Negg.
If you aren’t having any luck on The Shop Wizard you can turn to The Trading Post to find hidden treasures. The downside to this type of scouting is that you have no idea when the person put the item up for trade, if they are online or if they know how much it is worth. This is where you have to sit and refresh the new listings and jump on the bargains, people who battle their pets are more likely to get rid of things like books, neggs and food items for less than the selling price in exchange for healing potions or weapons. If you come across someone like this you can Neomail them and ask them if they want to notify you when they put other items up for trade. I have a few people like this that I deal with; one person has a huge bookshop and has single handedly helped me raise my pets intelligence level over 200 points – he Neomails me when he restocks or he pricing things and I am the first one there. Another person is always looking for battle gear, weapons and TCG [The Card Game] cards so when I come across some great deals we work out some nice trades – I offer the items at about 25% less than what they are selling for and he bids with books with the same amount knocked off. Sometimes the deals aren’t exactly even but it all works out in the end.
There are a lot of scams that go on at The Trading Post, most of which revolve around the rarity index of items. The rarity of an item has almost nothing to do with how much it is worth – the exception being items that are given out when you complete the top level faerie quests. Things like berries, plushies and other common goods may have a high number on the rarity index but that is only an indication of how often it is stock in the shops. Scout the Trading Post long enough and you will see exactly what I am talking about. There are always people hawking their wares as “rare” and “hard to find” and when you look on the Shop Wizard you see what they are selling for. A few people do this because they are new and are looking at the estimated price on the item lookup but a vast majority of them are just looking to scam newbies. The best way to tackle this is to have another browser window open to check the price and always have a few cheap items to bid with – if you offer a cheap item with a generous amount of NP and get your offer in before others, you might just get that lovely acceptance notification and have the item deposited in your inventory.
Scratchcards
There are a lot of different scratchcards that you can purchase from shop owners at the site. Sidnee is located in the Haunted Woods and The Scratchcard Wockey is located on Terror Mountain. You can only purchase one card every six hours; The Wocky sells his for 600 NP [Faeries Fortune, Terror Trove, Race To Riches etc] and Sidnee sells his for 1,200 NP [Scratchcard of Doom, Festering Fortune etc]. This is a great way to make some quick NP – buy them from the shop then sell them for a few hundred more NP in your shop. Of course there are people like me that check the Shop Wizard to see what the selling price is and I hold on to the cards until the price is high. Recently the Terror Trove cards have been selling for about 1,000 NP – up from their norm of about 900 NP. This type of increase usually happens when the jackpot it high or the shop keeper isn’t handing out as many of them. I used to buy the cards and scratch them off and after doing that about twenty times and ending up with snowballs or Poogles, I gave up. If you scout the Shop Wizard for cards you would be wise to use the “exact match” option, this way you will get results of a single type of card – some of the ones purchased in the Haunted Woods have variations such as the regular cards or the fake ones that were released when the cards were in beta.
You are almost guaranteed to make money on the cards purchased from Terror Mountain but the ones from the Haunted Woods are a hit or miss venture. I often wondered why people would spend 1,200 NP to buy a card from Sidnee when they could get them for less on the Shop Wizard. If you wondered that as well, here is the deal. You can get an avatar from the purchase or you could get a rare card that’s worth thousands if you care to sell it. This also means that people who buy these cards might not know the real value of them and will put them in their shop for about 1,500 NP, looking to make some quick change from it. Again, if you are going to scout The Wiz, use the “exact item” option so you will get results of one card. Prices do tend to fluctuate so don’t rush to put the cards in your shop; you can hold out until the price jumps or the jackpot swells and maximize your earning potential. This was the case with the Terror Trove cards, I had about twenty of them in my SDB [safety deposit box] and saw that the price was hovering at around 1,050 NP per card. I put them all in my shop at 1,000 NP and they sold in less than a minute. Cost per card – 600 NP, profit per card, 400 NP. Not bad, not bad at all.
Rare Item Codes
This is something that I have had pretty good luck with but that doesn’t mean that you will have the same results. Rare item codes are found on Neopet related merchandise such as trading cards, talking toys and hand held games. When you make a purchase you will get a code that can be redeemed at the Space Station and once you enter the code you will be given a choice – sort of like a mystery box deal. You will have three choices and if you pass on one of them, you can’t change your mind. You aren’t told what the item is until you make your choice so it’s the luck of the cards as to what you will get. I did have a few codes that just gave me an item without having to make a choice however the ones from the packs of trading cards have all been the “three choices” option. I did have a few rare item codes that didn’t work and I filled out the form, sent it off to Neopets and got a reply a week or so later. They apologized for the error and deposited an item in my inventory and another time they gave me another code to enter – I’m not sure what determines how this type of error is handled but they do take care of any redemption issues. Now, with that being said, don’t try to scam them and tell them that the code doesn’t work because you will need to provide information about the item that was purchased, where it was purchased, the price etc so they will have some type of tracking method to work with.
Redeeming a rare item code could also get you an avatar or a Battledome Challenger – but to be honest, it’s been so long since I did my first redemption I couldn’t tell you which I got first but I did get both the Space Faerie battle challenge and avatar when I redeemed codes for products and cards. Some people go to the Shop Ad message board and try to sell codes but this is a risky thing to do. First, you have no idea if the code is real or not or if it is real – if it’s already been redeemed. Second, you have no way to trade for it so you have to rely on the person holding the code to send it to you once you’ve purchased an overpriced item from their shop or sent them something. It’s really not worth it to try and get rare item codes this way – that is unless you know someone who is on the up and up and isn’t going to scam you. There are a lot of kids in the area that collect the cards and do battles but they really don’t do much at the site so I swap the rarer cards for their cards that have the codes on them. Everyone is happy, their parents don’t have to sink a ton of money into purchasing packs to get rare cards and occasionally I redeem a code that gives me a really rare item.
Random Events
Fro time to time you might be fortunate enough to get a random event. This is something that happens – surprise – at random when you are navigating around the site. Some people argue that donating items to The Money Tree will increase your chances of getting one and others say that it goes according to the number of pages you visit. If it were that easy then everyone would be donating things and hitting the refresh button over and over. No one knows what triggers a random event, except of course the programmers at the site and they aren’t talking to anyone about it. Each region has it’s own type of random event, if you are in the middle of playing a game like Pyramids you might just miss the message that appears on the screen so if you see items in your inventory that you didn’t purchase or you received no Neomail message that you were given an item by another user, chalk it up to a random event. These can be anything as insignificant as a piece of food or as extravagant as a codestone or negg. Most people don’t know it but you can get rare items from places like The Wheel of Excitement; I’ve gotten several extremely rare books from spinning the wheel but on the same token, my pets have also come down with several diseases from it. Items from random events are fair game and can be sold for a huge profit – since the items [barring those obtained from spinning the wheels] are given to you, any price you put on them is pure profit.
Retired Items
I touched upon the subject earlier but this is such a fantastic way of making NP that I really want to go into detail about it. There’s no telling what is going to get retired so stocking up on random items is a crap shoot. Just because one type of item gets retired doesn’t mean that similar items are also going to be taken out of the shops. A good example of this is the Orange Snow Puff, it was retired and almost immediately the prices on other flavors went through the roof – everyone stocked up on them anticipating that they others would follow suit. The same thing happened with the Rainbow Snowballs [a food, not a weapon], these retired and the others went up in price shortly thereafter. So far none of them have been retired and I am sure there are some shopkeepers out there that are sitting on the ones they purchased just waiting to see the word “retired” pop up under the name when they check their safety deposit box.
Food and books are the biggest things when shopping for retired items. These are the things that are used once then removed from your inventory. There are some weapons that are “one use only” – like the Radioactive Muffin – and those shot up in price when they were initially retired. Some people see that it is retired and just ditch the item thinking it isn’t worth much – that’s where scouting the Shop Wizard pays off. I found more than a few of these at 500 NP and scooped them up immediately – the going price for them these days is about 5,000 NP and the price will only increase when the next war hits. Deciding what to invest your NP in is never an easy call but as I have said so many times, books and food are always a good place to start. Just like death and taxes, people are always going to try to educate their pets and feed them food to keep them happy.
Prices do tend to fluctuate when it comes to retired items so unless you are in it for the long haul, buy low and sell high – but sell quick because e once people start to see there is money to be made from the initial rush, people will flood the market essentially lower in the price. Sit back and watch the prices drop and scoop up the deals. If you are a hard core junkie of the site you know that there are always new members joining – members that won’t have the luxury of having access to low prices – look at it this way – a year from now, “The Magic Paw” might get retired. Someone who has just joined the site and is going for a book award will want to get as many books as possible – and one of them will be that title. Sure you can sell it for 300 NP now and make some quick NP off of it – or you can hold on to it and sell it when it’s worth thousands. Of course there is no way to tell what is going to get retired or when it is going to happen so if you are ultra paranoid like me, you will stock up on just about everything hoping to cash in on it at a later date.
Your Shop
One of the easiest ways to get a positive and steady flow of NP is to have a well stocked shop. The biggest mistake that new members make it expanding their shop too quickly – they want to have a huge shop but sink all their money into making it larger so they can stock more items. The problem here is that once you expand your shop, which does get to be expensive after a while, you don’t have any NP left over to buy items to stock it. This is one of the reasons you see the 300 sized shops charging an arm and a leg for items – they have to in order to make a profit and keep expanding. All of this is perpetuated by status and being listed in one of the marketplaces. Have a shop that is large enough and you will get listed there – but why, oh why would that be so attractive? Well, it is nice to have a huge shop but it’s the quests that keep these places thriving. When you are on a quest, unless it is one that you seek out, you can’t use the Shop Wizard to find the item that is needed to complete it. Since a majority of these 300 sized shops are part of malls, it’s free advertising. If you have a shop that specializes in books or codestone and you hook up with a few other people with specialty shops – you can attract those who are new to the site, those who are on critical quests or those who can’t get any help from the quest message board.
I got burned a few times when I was a new member; I had a quest that required me to find a specific card and when I asked on the message board if anyone had one someone said that they had one in their SDB and they would put it in their shop for me. Not knowing the price of cards at the time, I fell for it hook, line and sinker. The person went and bought the card for 400 – 500 NP and put it in their shop for 3,000 NP. Since the price was so high the seller knew that no one else would buy it and I was a sure sale. Oh the thing you learn by trial and error. When I completed the quest and was allowed back on the Shop Wizard, curiosity got the best of me and I wanted to see how much the card was selling for. I almost fell over when I saw them as cheap as 350 NP. Since you can browse the shops in the marketplaces when you are on a quest, this is a target rich environment for people who are looking to make money – not just a profit – but a complete rape. I saw one shop that was selling baby food for 5,000 NP a bottle, this is something that usually sells for 150 NP – or at the very most 200 NP. So if someone is on a quest and is new at the site and has no idea that there is a quest help board, they could very easily fall for this type of raw deal and learn a very expensive lesson.
I price the stuff in my shop at or around what the average is on the Shop Wizard and I restock a few times a day when I have the time. Prices do change so if you see something that all of a sudden flies out of your shop after it sat there for weeks – be sure to check the prices or read the news to see if there is an avatar associated with it. Recently there was an avatar for toast that involved getting an item with the word bread in it and going to Techo Mountain. This sparked a fury of sales of anything that had the word bread in it – but the initial hours of avatar madness saw the price of “bread” going as high as four thousand points a loaf. This is something that normally sells for about 500 NP and all of a sudden it skyrockets. Even after people discovered that you could use anything that had the word bread in it to get the avatar – people still went after the plain “bread”. If you have a healthy stock of items, these are the times that you can really make a profit at the site. It’s all about supply and demand. Another great example of this is “bottle of love”, an item sold in the gift shop. There’s no real use for this item outside of giving it to someone or using it for a Faerieland Employment Agency job but the prices are now hovering in the 2,000 NP range. This is the type of item that doesn’t really get a lot of push until Valentine’s Day rolls around – then the prices swell.
Restocking is essential to having a lot of traffic. You can restock from the main shop or pick up deals at member shops and resell it at a higher price. But be warned, some people get very irritated when you do this. I had one person Neomail me over and over again telling me not to buy from their shop if my only intent was to resell it for a higher price in my shop. Hey, if someone wants to buy something from my shop and resell it in their, more power to them. As long as they aren't going to rip people off to try to pull a scam I've got no problem with people restocking from my shop, please feel free :] That might answer the question that a few people asked about why people sell theing for 999 instead of 1,000 NP - basically so those who have had bad experiences with the "restock meanies" can shop without having their name show up on someones slaes history.
As always, thanks for the read!
~^V^~ Freak ~^V^~
© 2004 Freak369
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