OSRS Flipping 2024 - Learning the Basics

If you've never merched in Old School Runescape before, then you're seriously missing out on additional revenue on top of what you are already earning in game. Merchanting allows anyone with gold in their bank to both enjoy the game we all love, as well as making their money work for them at the grand exchange. Creating two avenues of revenue streams.

This doesn't mean however that you should take up the practice lightly. For whoever decides to wing it and put no effort into studying the market, the game or the communities perception on various items, is simply asking to lose money. The most obvious case of this happening, is when players who don't merch at all, or who are new to the merching scene get burned by trying to ride the hype train with ranger gloves.

Ouch... That's one painful graph to look at... mainly because those who were burned are the very players I've just described. New or never merched and wanted to get in on the hype. These are some of the easiest traps to avoid, but it's always painful to watch new players lose a significant portion of their bank to these events and then give up on flipping all together.

Now if you don't know why these gloves spiked, it's because of the Old School Runescape team releasing a developers blog on Raids 2 rewards, and how rangers gloves would be used to combine with a new ranging item, vambraces; creating an item sink for them. Ranger gloves are already rare simply because they're a reward from elite clue scrolls, and those can't be completed by everyone and those who can, don't often camp those clues.

Update: The Old School developer team have retracted ranger gloves being necessary for the new vambraces. The Raids 2 reward will now be a standalone item

What is Flipping/Merchanting?

The literal definition is “the act of selling commodities”, but in Runescape it’s much more. Merchanting or flipping (as some might refer to it) is the act of purchasing any item in hopes of selling it back to the market for a higher price then what they’ve invested in it.

Sounds easy enough right? Well… that’s the first problem with many new comers. They have this preconceived notion that you can just walk right into the market with zero preparations and suddenly make a profit on any given item.

Buy and Sell Margins

You’ll often hear margin checks being thrown around quite a bit in the merchanting world. It’s a common practice, but is not by any means a sustainable one at all levels of any price point – for several reasons. First, lets go over the basics of margins.

Margin Checking

Simply put, the margin is the price difference between the highest sell offer and the lowest buy offer.

• Buy the item for above its market value (+5%). Note that price, this is your sell price
• Sell the item below its market value (-5%) and note that price, this is your buy price
• The difference between them is your profit margin

The above scenario works perfectly with low priced/high volume items, because the community controls the price. Not one single individual can hold or manipulate the prices by hoarding themselves. If someone had 50m fire runes, that changes nothing about it's price point, and whilst this may be an extremely low priced item, it plays true to this statement.

However, as the image above shows, you shouldn't be checking margins for all types of items.

I can’t say specifically at which point you would want to stop checking margins in-game, but the two photos below should help provide a guideline. Item One (see image below) is traded so frequently that the community as a whole has a strong hold on its price point. Where as Item Two (see image below) has little traded at any given point time, making it more susceptible to price change. This of course ignores the idea of hypes, panics, item usefulness and game updates.

Utilizing the Graphs

The price point can change quite radically at any given point in time during the day. This is why you should only view the table as a shopping list, and view the charts as real data to base your flips.

However, this skill requires practice and due dilligence, it's not something you're going to master in one day, or even a week or month.

In order to base your margins, you’ll want to look at the varying differences between the red and blue lines – but you’ll also want to look at all timeframes. If the item is hitting its historic peak and there were no updates in game that would’ve made such item more valuable, then you’re possibly looking at a bubble.

Conclusion

Merchanting isn’t an easy practice by any means. It requires dedication, practice and patience to become truly good at it. Don’t get discouraged by any losses you face. Whatever form of flipping you plan on doing, don’t invest your whole bank into it, because if you do experience a heavy loss, you’ll still have value in your bank that won’t be affected.

Don’t sit at the grand exchange all day waiting for items to flip. Do other activities in game while your items are being bought or sold. Let your money work for you and make money elsewhere as well.

Sometimes I hear players say, “well zulrah makes more money per hour then if I were to sit at the GE.” That’s good, but that doesn’t mean you should keep your money in your bank just wasting away. Put it to good use and allow it to continue growing your bank while you also enjoy the game.

But most importantly, have fun merchanting and best of luck on your flips!