A Scientist's Life in Eve

Currently, I take the expected / lazy / quickest (delete as you feel appropriate) route to selling the majority of the things I make.  With the exception of stocking our market in our null sec region, I take things to a trade hub to sell.  This results in lower margins, but the throughput roughly matches my output.

I do, however, like the increased profitability per unit sold we get from the null sec market.  Don’t get me wrong, we don’t operate profiteering in any way.  We do charge more than Jita, but usually no more than 5% to 10% more.  The throughput is, quite simply, sometimes dreadful.

This has lead me to start considering alternative markets and how that might effectively work.  I have market alts in the main trade hubs, but am now considering the logistics of amending that a little to open up into other markets.  However, one needs to consider ones target audience first before starting.

What do I mean exactly?

Well, there would be little point me trying to sell in a hi-sec entry system to one of the major null sec alliances’ space.  Why would they buy from there?  They will have a market in their own 0.0 space somewhere, and then operate the usual way of either flying or jumping the other stuff in themselves.  So I think I can probably rule that out.

We already get reasonable sales from our own alliance and from our landlord and other blues, so again probably no real opportunity to do much more on that front without stepping on somebody else’s toes and potentially causing political issues.

So this, on a very simplistic level, leaves the following target markets:

1. Faction Warfare
2. Ebil lo-sec pwirates
3. Hi-sec in non-major tradehub regions

Being completely cynical – is it likely that both 1 and 2 simply use neutral alts to get stuff from Jita etc., so would the risk of jumping into a war zone (whichever way you look at it, either faction warfare or pirates) result in a pay off, or simply stuff sitting on the market not moving?

I think that 3 is probably the most likely to yield results.  Logistically I’d just need to put a trader alt in a location where they could quickly move between 2 or 3 regions to update market orders.  The annoying bit would be getting the supplies to the market locations.

Maybe I’ve just become a bit predictable in that my default position is to jump into a freighter and go to a trade hub.  Time to shake things up a bit?