Bunnie’s Maplestory Merchanting Guide

Bunnie, the creator of this guide, deleted her Basil account, and with it, all of her threads/posts. With her permission and encouragement, I reposted all of her guides for her. She’ll be maintaining/updating these guides through me. Unfortunately I can’t answer any questions about merchanting/prices, I don’t know much about either. All credit goes to her of course for writing this.

The Shop Permit

Merchanting is extremely hard without a shop permit. The only other option that you have if you don’t have one is to spam your items in the Chan 1 FM entrance. That takes up a lot of time, the lag is terrible and it always gives me a headache after a while.

There are several different types of shop permits. The most worthwhile are the regular shop permit and the Christmas shop permit, each lasting for 90 days and costing under 5 dollars. If you are just starting to merchant, the regular permit for 1.8k NX is your best bet. It gives you 16 slots to fill with things you need to sell. If merchanting eventually becomes a major focus in your gameplay, then go with the Christmas Shop Permit. It gives 24 slots for items.

The other shop permits are special permits in which you can leave your store there, and a hired merchant will sell for you for a certain amount of time, i.e. 1 day. You don’t need to be in the FM or even signed on for your shop to be there. However, the time span of these are very short compared to the regular 90-day permits, and therefore not suggested unless you D/C a lot or have plenty of NX to spare.

If you are just starting merchanting, I suggest the longer-lasting, cheaper permits. These will allow you to adjust to prices, take your time shopping, etc. without any worry of wasting possible “sale time”. Mushie houses should only be bought if you have a lot of stuff (and usually, multi-million meso stuff) you need to sell at once. (TY Dracolix)

Your best bet is just to set up a shop and minimize MapleStory while you are away.

What to Buy and Sell

Everything that can be sold is potentially profitable, however some things are naturally better sellers than others. I will try to list them according to the amount of mesos you have. Of course you can do stuff from a lower category even when you have more mesos. Profit is profit.

THE FOLLOWING ARE NOT PRICE RANGES BUT RATHER THE RANGE YOU SHOULD HAVE IN MESOS BEFORE TRYING TO RESELL THE ITEMS LISTED.

What you should consider reselling with:

Less than 500k
Try to PQ or something to get some money. Or you can collect leathers to make Work Gloves, do the Eos Scroll and Orbis Scroll quests everyday, and collect iron pig hooves to make steel plates. Train with a cleric, etc.

500k
Ores and plates/jewels
A key thing is that jewels and plates often cost less than the ores themselves. This is because most people already have some of the ores themselves, but not enough to make a plate.

Cheap DEF/M.DEF scrolls
If you are in Ludi, people will often be dropping or getting rid of their LMPQ scrolls very cheaply. You can buy a lot by going through the channels and then sell them in your shop for a bit more.

Clean work gloves from leathers. Snowshoes that you can buy in El Nath for 28k-30k [depending on the job] at the armor shop and sell for more in FM.

Magic rocks and summoning rocks (TY Crayola555)

Ancient Tree Sap and Drake’s Blood (TY pigflys)

Exchange quest items like zombie teeth (TY Khoi5454)

1-2 Mil
You can also add diamonds and dark crystal ores to the things you can resell. One interesting thing you can make with the ores you’ve gathered are the moon/star rocks. You take them to Arwen in Ellinia. Moon rocks take one of each plate and star rocks, one of each jewel. You can usually get 50-100k over what you spent making them.

Stars such as icys, kumbis, etc. are good at this stage too. Eos and Orbis Scrolls are lovely if you are able to get them in bulk for about 15-20k less than regular FM prices.

If you can get some Dead Mine scrolls for cheap, they are very easy to sell.

Go to the Kerning City PQ area and buy cheap 10% overall dex scrolls. (TY NewxAge)

3-5 Mil
You can buy tobis for about 50-100k less than what they sell for in FM fairly easily. These tend to go quick. You should also be looking at above average equips of your class. If you have more than 1 char and are more experienced with equips of several classes, then that’s even better. A lot of people who grind don’t know when they have found an above average equip, particularly if it’s a class they are unfamiliar with. So you can get fairly above average things for regular avg prices if you look at the stats of the items you browse through.

On weekends, you can go to Eos tower 101th Floor where the LPQers gather to buy scrolls from them. Due to CPQ drawing a lot of people away from LPQ, this is really only efficient during a busy hour. (TY bamface)

5-10 Mil
Red Whips, Onyx Apples, and clean Blue Sauna Robes are the best sellers here. Equips are still very good. You can even start reselling some of the more crappy scrolled items that people get frustrated with and let go for very cheap. Scrolls are also an option, of course. Glove, dagger, claw and 2-handed sword attack scrolls are particularly good profit.

20-30 Mil
Scrolls are amazing if you know the prices of them well. Don’t just do the common scrolls anymore, but some of the more obscure ones as well. Steelies and ilbis if you manage to get them cheap. Just remember that ilbis have a fairly high tax, so it isn’t worth it if it’s less than 500k under normal price. Scrolled equips are also good at this point. The ones of your class are particularly great as it allows you to
1. Learn more about your class;
2. Get equips that you need personally at good prices (because you are always looking);
3. Make profit.
Continue with this until you get to 100 mil.

100 Mil+
Nicely scrolled or even godly equips can be extremely good profit at this point. Also, iTCG items! But be warned, the prices fluctuate a lot for these.

There are no limits to reselling. The items listed above are only to start you off. Once you get familiar with prices and decide on your specialization, then go for whatever works for you!

Where to Buy

The best way to get items for your store is by browsing other people’s shops and looking for sellers in the Chan 1 FM Entrance.

When browsing shops, you should know that Chan 1, 2 and 3 FM 1 prices are usually inflated. For more crowded servers, that can extend to channels 4-6 as well. One method that I use is to start at Chan 19 FM 1 and keep browsing through each channel until I hit channel 6. Then I go to Chan 1 and start from FM 8 to all the way to the last FM in the top right corner. Finally, I go to channels 2 and 3 to look in the FM 2 and 3 of each.

If you are buying things, such as scrolls in FM entrance, you have to make yourself seen. One way is to put 4 @ signs, space bar, then another 4 @ signs until you fill up the chat bar. This will appear as a column of @ signs and bump your message above others. Shorter messages are the best because Chan 1 FME is messy and crowded with horrible lag and many won’t read all of it.

BasilMarket auctions often have very decent deals on equips, both clean and scrolled, though discounted scrolls are harder to find. Check the “Ending Soon” option for last minute sales and the “All Auctions” option to search for a particular item or class of items.

How to Buy

No matter who contacted who first, it is always helpful for you to ask them how much they want for their item. Some people will straight-up tell you. If they give you a pretty low price, don’t haggle very much with them. People do seem to be impatient and easily offended these days and you don’t want to lose a big fish just to save on a worm.

If they ask you to offer, you have to evaluate the person. Give them the lowest price you can without offending them. It helps if you start off with something like: “I don’t know (establish that you are exploring prices so that they don’t get immediately offended), is ____k/mil ok?”

Offering in the form of a question is important since it doesn’t make it seem like you’re making a demand.

If the person gives in a little, increase your offer a little — try to go for a similar increase to what they are decreasing (i.e. they decrease by 100k, you increase by 100k). This strategy is effective because they can only think you are giving an okay haggle since the increment/decrement is exactly what they gave you. Continue doing this until you reach the price you have in mind as the maximum you are willing to pay. Inform them of the maximum. Keep this maximum slightly lower than what you are really willing to shell out, so that if they are getting really desperate just to get a little more, you can just give it to them without much of a fuss.

ALWAYS be polite. Do not use noob-speak or chat-speak. It gives less credibility to a lower offer and will increase the chances of people dismissing you as an idiot who doesn’t know prices.

ALWAYS say thank you.

Another place to find good deals is when someone smegas a sale. The smega-er might not have anything cheap, but there are always people who will open up shops hoping to leech off the group of buyers that the smega-er drew over.

Spamming “B>Scrolls” gets horrible scrolls half the time and you should instead try to trade the people spamming that they are selling scrolls. If you are really bored, you can also camp out at popular Gachapon places like NLC and Zipangu. (TY Scomomage)

How to Sell

First step, you must get an FM spot. (The following may be different on less crowded servers; just go where people are and as close to the door as you can!)

Try to stick to FM 1 as much as possible as it is the first room that people usually go into.

Ideally you’ll want a door spot, no matter which channel it’s on or what room it’s in. When I say door spot, I mean that when someone comes through the entrance portal, your shop is within their screen without them having to move. Of course the closer to the actual portal, the better.

You have to be careful when buying a spot. Don’t buy if there is more than 1 person under that spot. Even when it is only the shop owner, make sure you have the item inventory open and at the Cash Shop Items tab.

Descriptive shop names will give better results than random shop names. Shoppers are more likely to visit shops with names like: -Good Equips- rather than a random title like -I like pie-.