Spending my retirement in a game

chapter 93

Bree was currently driving the carriage along the rough street of the plains on their way toward the capital of the human country Litgern, while Eisen and Komer were sitting in the back of the carriage, talking about business.

"What we should do first is give you a rough sense of the value of items. I'm sure you know why the items you were selling yesterday were priced so cheaply, right?" Eisen asked, leaving Komer to nod basically instantly in response.

"Yeah, because they were all basically failures. At least that's what Mister Hastings told me."

"Exactly. Which brings us to the first point. Quality. Together with the item's rank, it's probably the easiest way to get a rough idea of what something should cost without even looking at the effort to make it or the material. But again, you should only use it as a rough base point. Do you know how item ranks and quality work?"

The young man with vibrant red hair shook his head while crossing his arms. "No, I don't really. And I'm guessing it's not random, right?"

"It's not, yeah. There are eight different qualities, Lowest to Perfect, at every rank. And it's still a fact that a Lowest Quality Rank 1 item, is still of better quality than a perfect quality rank 0 item. But the actual quality rating only slightly influences the price compared to the rank. The difference between an Average Quality item and a Perfect quality item may only be a few coins, while the difference between a rank 0 item and a rank 2 item is like the difference between copper and silver coins. And that is because you need to be of a specific rank in the skill that you're making something with for the item to be that rank. Because it only gets harder to rank your skills up over time, rank 7 items are obviously quite rare compared to rank 1 or 2 items."

Komer took in all of this information, even taking notes on a piece of paper to make sure he wouldn't forget anything, before turning back to Eisen to listen to the next part of what he knew about how to sell items.

"The quality will make the price of items vary the most. It's like an amplifier. Let's say you have a base item with a material worth of 1 copper coin, but it's an incredible rank 10 item. The item with a base worth of 1 copper will suddenly be worth 1 platinum coin. So, taking that into account, if you take materials that are worth 1 silver coin at the start and make a rank 10 item out of them, they will be worth a crystal coin instead."

Nodding in resposne to this quite useful revelation, Komer noted this down as well. Of course Eisen also added that this was just an example, and those were not in the slightest accurate numbers.

But at least this helped Komer understand how quality really influenced the price of items, and that was the most important part about it.

"Next, there is of course the workload and complexity. Aulu here will cost a lot more than other items with the same rank, quality, and material cost. And that's because it took me quite long to make her, at least for my standards, and because I used multiple different skills and crafts during her construction. That brings the price up as well. But that's something that you'll have to look into for every different type of item, of course I will also tell you how hard it was to make it and how long it took. Since I doubt I have to explain supply and demand to you, I'll move on to the something else, another important part that you even mentioned before." Eisen explained while setting up another flower pot with seeds in it for Caria to continue practicing her skills, and Komer scratched his chin while thinking about it, before he seemed to have realized what Eisen was talking about.

"Ah, do you mean the brand?" Eisen sat back down on the floor opposite to Komer and nodded, since that was exactly what he meant.

"Of course. You said before that we could just sell items for a higher price by telling everyone they were made by me. That would definitely bring up the price, but we shouldn't jump into it too quickly. Reputation is probably the most important thing for a merchant, don't you think? If you had kept scamming people, your reputation would have dropped, and then even if you had sold actually god-tier items for a few copper coins, people would mistrust you and just not buy anything from you anyway. You have to slowly raise your reputation as a merchant, and then with that you can think about slowly raising your prices. Of course not by a lot, but a little bit is alright."