RuneScape: Merchant Clans – How Do They Work?
Many people wonder how merchant clans work and more importantly how they earn so much money. I am just one of a handful of players who are ranked in RuneScape’s biggest f2p merchant clan, "Be Mercher" and I will explain all.
A merchant clan, put simply, is a group of people who all buy into the same item forcing the price to rise before selling it for a profit. However for a clan to successfully manage this you need hundreds (if not thousands) of members and a lot of organisation.
When you first join a merchant clan you will notice the odd clans title, take for example: ‘Gold bar780′. This means that you are to buy gold bars for maximum price at the Grand Exchange then you are to bank them and wait patiently till 780gp, which is the drop price (the intended price to sell at).
Sadly when merching an item in a clan people will sell just before it reaches the actual drop price. This means that the price will stop rising and start to fall and therefore the rest of the clan will have to also sell early, making slightly less profit.
A key thing to note when merchanting is that you may lose money. This is more likely to happen if you buy into an item latter into the merch than at the start. To maximize profits it is always best to buy an item right at the start, this way you can get them before they have started to go up in price.
Another point is that in any good merchant clan unranked players cannot speak. This is to stop spammers and people advertising other clans. Usually to get a rank you would have to advertise for a long period of time and proving your loyalty.
If you have a question then it is common practice to pm any of the ranked members. Providing it is a sensible question they will answer you with a reply via the clan opposed to a player message. This saves the ranks having to continually add and remove people from their friends list.
Well that is pretty much it.
thank,
corrosive.
