Most of the trading guides focus solely on trading within a station, but there comes a point when you can’t invest more ISK into the endeavour; maybe the number of orders you have to manage becomes too much, or maybe there simply aren’t any markets worth investing in. One option for a trader looking to expand their ISK-making horizons is inter-regional trading. It’s straightforward in principle: you buy goods in one location a low price and then move them to another location to be sold at a higher price. There a million different variations on this kind of trading, but three stand out as the most common: trade hub to trade hub, trade hub to mission hub, and trade hub to PvP hub.
To Trade Hub
There a number of the trade hubs within New Eden, and the prices of goods will almost never be uniform across all items. This price difference is where an inter-regional trader can make their ISK, but the trick is being able to identify items worth moving. For those looking to get the upper hand without trawling through Eve’s market data, Eve Central Trade Finder is a useful tool that references prices between two locations. This tool takes the user submitted market data of Eve Central and cross references prices to find items worth moving and selling. Keep in mind that Eve Central’s price data is all user submitted, so be wary of older data as things may have changed.
Once you identify the items, you move them between hubs. You could either move the items yourself or set up a courier contract to have them moved. Either way, you have the choice of selling your items directly to the highest buy order or setting up your own sell order once the goods arrive. The first option will obviously give you the quickest return, but at a much lower profit margin than setting up a sell order. The downside to a sell order is that its price will need to be updated from time to time.
To Mission Hub
The first order of business when looking to supply PvE players with goods from a trade hub is to find an active mission hub. There are several way to do this, but the easiest is to simply to consult the mission hub page on the Eve University Wiki. This method has the advantage of only focusing on the corporation that players most commonly run missions for. What you are looking for in this deluge of information are systems that have a large number of agents, preferably with levels 1-4 represented. You can then take the system name you find and again use the Eve Central Trade Finder to find the items worth moving. Since you will be looking to sell to mission runners, it is important to focus on moving items that would be of use to them, such as ammo, drones, damage resistance modules, and so on. You then move the items to your chosen system and set up sell orders for you goods. You’re obviously not going to see as quick of a return as with trade hub to trade hub, but the profit margins tend be higher.
To PvP Hub
The biggest concern when transporting goods from a trade hub to a PvP hub that you are going to be trading between a highsec and either lowsec or nullsec. This means that there is going to be a larger amount of risk to get you items to their intended market. On the upside, the profit margins tend to be very good.
The first thing to do when trading to a PvP hub is to identify potential destination systems. This generally involves finding the regions with the most PvP activity and then going to those regions to see if there are any trade hubs that items tend to be centralized at. You then can use the Eve Central Trade Finder, combined with your common sense, to find items worth trading. Remember that you will be catering to PvPers, so ships, modules, and ammo generally sell well. The process of having your items moved to your destination is more complicated, thanks to the risks involved. A Jump Freighter is the name of the game, and using a freight service like Black Frog Logistics or Push Industries is recommended if you don’t have your own Jump Freighter.
Inter-regional trading is a good method for making ISK. The act of moving items from one location to the other will always be of value; most people can’t be bothered to do it themselves. That’s the crux of inter-regional trading: you are capitalizing on other people’s laziness.
This article originally appeared on TheMittani.com, written by Lioso.
