Well I was curious what people would need most of the igloo items that I AB for. So i looked into my shop history and found grape gummu mallet which sold for 11280. Seeing this as the most pointless item in my shop, I clicked on the user, who had 4 painted pets, a size 120 gallery with 50mil+ items and a size 120 shop. I take a look in her shop and notice shes one of those people with the beastly malls... So i look on page three of the candy section and there I see none other than MY grape gummy mallet for sale for 11120. Why would somebody be so stupid, and WHY would some1 who clearly has a 20mil+ bank account be buying items for SMMMALLL profit resale? not only was this person gonna make a VERY small profit to begin with, they are actually losing money due to their own carelessness. I wonder if thats how all legit people make theyre money... pretty stupid if u ask me..
It's called a loss-leader. You get a number of items that you sell at the lowest price on the SSW. Then, people come into your shop and end up buying more items when they see them, maybe just because they can't be bothered to look up anyone selling for cheaper, or maybe because they assume that because the item they originally came for was the cheapest on the SSW was the cheapest, then the other items will be. Sellers take advantage of this and so will price other items in their shop at a higher price than the average on the SSW/SW. It's actually pretty smart, not stupid. You see it happen in real life all the time, so why not do it on Neopets?
Other than being a loss leader, Malls often have rules on how much of your type of stuff (Mall's allocate positions eg. battledome) that you must have in your shop, limits like at least two pages of stuff (160 unique items), realistically the items that actually do get sold mostly are only like one or two types of items so the person may have just been lazy decided to stock a good looking item to simply fill in space, something they didn't really expect to sell but to meet their quota for the mall
Mall owners do pull in alot of money through people who need items for a farie quest, and infaltion. That's why things are so overpriced- if an item is priced at 3k normally, a mall owner might price them at 7k. When someone needs it for a quest, they can't use the SW and will buy it from that shop. Also, in a few months or even a year or so, that item's worth could rise. As it inflates, the item will sell when the worth rises to 7k. Basically, aside from questers, over pricing is the whole thinking of making 2k later instead of 1k now.
And by buying stuff and maybe overpricing, mall owners who have so much money immediately affects the inflation rate of the item. After a month or two of this trend they actually get more money than u can imagine given first, the overpriced item, and second, the no. of item they managed to acquire before the inflation.
if its not mall owners buying your items, its probably people on quests. Most of the stuff i get from igloo is foods. All of it which is asked for by the kitchen quest.
Skeem and Blizt - The question being asked was why they were UNDER-pricing, not-overpricing. One question - did the person who bought the item have a shop counter? Sometimes people will buy a ton of items and price them low in order to get people into the shop and boost their counter every now and then. This could be because they just want more to show up, or if they are part of a mall, there may be a rule whereby they have to have a certain number of visitors to their shop each week/month
It's like when you go to wall mart for something on sale and endup buying something else, and you say 'doh' at the end. lol.