Running a Profitable Shop

In this article, I am going to teach you some advanced shop strategies for extreme profits. Choosing any one of these and implementing it correctly will help your sales. You will be shocked with the amount of neopoints in your till each day. Your days of an empty till will be no more!

The Packrat Shop

This is one of the easiest stores to start. Basically, you are stocking inexpensive and very cheap items. You want to have a big variety of junk like old rotten sandals and kelp. You also should have gross foods, inexpensive food, keychains, and dung. Your shop should be the only one a packrat avatar hunter needs to visit. That means you should have hundreds of different items in stock. You should use shop wizard and buy up anything four neopoints and under. Try to have at least fifteen of each item. Resell for ten neopoints an item and you will make huge profits! It is important that you advertise on the shop boards daily. Make a post that everything is ten neopoints and you have a massive collection perfect for packrats. Restock often and you will make a huge profit in no time!

Theme Shop

This is one of the most creative styles of shopkeeping I have come across. You can stock all purple items or all things that float. Maybe you want to stock only things with wheels. The possiblities are endless as long as the stock reflects a certain theme or themes. The Neopians you are trying to sell to are gallery owners. For every theme there is a gallery well loved by its owner. They may find a special addition in your shop or even buy you out of stock completely. You will want to price your items at shop wizard or a little below it. Gallery owners will flock to your shop in no time!

Buyable Unbuyable Shop

This is one of the most difficult yet rewarding shops out there. This shop is not for the faint of heart. It is for the true hardcore restockers. To fill this shop you will have to restock at Neopian stores, shop wizard, trading post, auctions, and the trading boards. You need to be able to haggle items down to 80,000 or less to make a profit. Code items and other hard to sell things are easy to haggle down. You will need to eat, breathe, and sleep those ultra rare items. If you can spot an unbuyable within two seconds of a Neopian shop restock, then this is for you. All items in your shop need to be unbuyables selling for 99,999 neopoints each. " Why would I sell an item worth 200,000 neopoints for 99,999?", you ask. High turnover is the answer; your stock will sell very fast. Which means the chocolate you just bought for 5000 neopoints, made you a profit of 94,999 in five minutes. This shop can make you very wealthy if you are a skilled restocker.

Mall Shop

A mall shop is a very profitable one. You need to find a good mall that advertises. Some malls charge a fee to each of its members to help pay for advertisement on the notice board. Other malls charge no fee, but every maller must advertise their shop on the mall board set up by the malls owner. Others do both for complete coverage. Good malls have requirements. They want your shop to be a certain size before joining. They also want you to always have 80% to 100% of your stock to be in your category. Usual categories include books, toys, beauty, and food just to name a few. They also want you to upgrade as often as you can. The benefits of being in a mall are very good. Neopians that are on a Faerie quest cannot use shop wizard. That is where you come in. A questor can see your specialized shop on the boards and get their needed item. Mallers generally price their stock 25% to 50% higher than the lowest shop wizard price. That makes for huge profits!

Selling in Bulk Shop

This type of shop generally has ten or fewer different items for sale. The catch is, they have at least thirty to fifty of each item in stock. The best way to run this shop is buying and reselling items other players get from their daily freebies each day. The daily puzzle often gives away an item with a little bit of neopoints for answering a trivia question. The item floods the market and the price goes down tremendously. That is when you buy up all the grapity slushies and stockpile them in your safe deposit box to sell next week. The price of the item will go back up to normal. Suddenly, an item you paid 5 neopoints for is worth its original 530 neopoints. If you stockpiled 200 of them, that is a profit of 105,000! Things to stock in this type of shop are prizes from Test Your Strength, Lunar Calendar, Tarla, and Advent Calendar, just to name a few. This shop doesn't require advertising as you should price items lowest on shop wizard. You will be amazed how quickly items will fly off the shelves!

Things that Will Kill your Sales

Now that I have given you a few ideas, it's time to talk about bad ideas for your shop. The biggest way to not make sales is having anything that can slow page load time. Flashy graphics may look nice, but are better saved for your lookup or gallery. Nothing is more irritating to a possible customer than to have the page load extra slow. Your shop should be plain, save for a mall banner (if you are a maller). The customer came to look for that item they want, not to be bombarded by dancing penguins. Another sure downfall is music in your shop. Sometimes Neopians are listening to their own music or enjoying the quiet of their home. Blaring music makes them cringe and find a quieter place to shop. Changing your font to invisible also is a bad idea. It may seem extremely witty, but most customers do not enjoy highlighting the prices to see them. Keeping your shop simple and easy to read will improve sales dramatically.

I am a maller with a shop size of 160 currently. I am always expanding and learning new tricks. I make a profit of 100,000 to 300,000 daily. I do hope you can use one or more of these strategies to improve YOUR profits. *waves to guildies*