Neopets Restocking Tips: Confessions of a Hoarder

Opening at shop at Neopets is one of the best ways to make Neopoints. My shop is currently size 121 but to enlarge it I will have to pay 24,200 NP so it can hold a maximum of 610 items. Each time you enlarge your shop it allows you to add another five items. That helps to explain why shops that are size 700 and larger grossly overprice their goods. I have been lucky and have gotten some Random Events that have enlarged my shop. For the time being I am not planning on enlarging it but I do try to keep it stocked at all time. For the past two days I experimented with adding more items but in smaller quantities. I waited to see what my Shop Till looked like and almost fell off my chair when I saw that in a 48 hour period I made over a million NP.

I didn't go for a quick kill; the most expensive items I had were three "Christmas Paint Brushes"; everything else was items I have hoarded over the years and had literally hundreds of them in my Safety Deposit Box. There are a lot of different ways to restock; and by that I mean buying things to sell in your shop. Some people only buy things on Half Price Day and spend hours hitting shops to buy them at the lowest price possible. Some people go for the high ticket items and sell them on the Trading Post. Me? I am a hoarder. If I don't have 200 - 300 of something then I get panic stricken.

I have seen things skyrocket overnight when they are used for an avatar or a quest. A good example of that is when the Halloween promotion was going on and three food items (Spooky Doughnut, Pumpkin Cookies, Pumpkin Pie) were needed for a recipe. Needless to say, I made a killing on all three of those items but I didn't abuse the situation. I sold them for a reasonable price - low enough to ensure that they would sell but not so high that I was raking people over the coals. Seasonal items that are books or foods are always a great thing to hoard; when they get retired you are guaranteed to make a profit on them.

How do you know what to stock in your shop? That takes a little detective work. You should hit the Faerieland Employment Agency to see what the jobs are and what the higher paying ones involve getting. Currently "Bar of Soap", "Bear", "Bluesticks" and "Baby Doll" are the four highest paying but there is no guarantee that you will see them every time the Agency refreshes. Items used for avatars are always hot sellers; "Pink Spooky Popcorn" is just one the food related avatars that you can get. Some people are willing to spend a tremendous amount of NP on getting avatars. If you missed the insanity that involved the Chef Bonju avatar (adding Orange Juice, Blumaroo Steak and "Gourmet Cooking For Your Pet" to the Cooking Pot) then you missed out on seeing these common items go through the roof. There is no way to know what items are going to be used for avatars so hoarding things can really pay off.

What Not To Do: There are a lot of Neopet scams that go on at the site; people will form groups to mass purchase items to buy up all the stock of an item then sell it at an inflated price. There is no rule stating that you can't purchase a thousand Dark Faerie Cookie Sandwiches or Altador Cup Chocolate Coins but when you work with others to influence the pricing on items, well, you can get frozen without a warning from TNT (The Neopets Team).

If you are going to stick with the Neopets shops to buy from, know your prices! Just because something is selling in a shop for 3,000 NP doesn't mean that is what you can sell it for. Example: In the Spooky Food Shop you will find things like "Almost Gummy Rat (Strawberry)", "Squishy Brain Wrap" and "Spooky Gooplecream" selling for anywhere from 100 - 300 NP. That might sound like a good deal until you check the Shop Wizard and see that you can get them for 20 NP or less. That is something that applies to almost all of the shops so it pays to know what something is selling for before you start buying.

Going through the Shop Wizard to buy items is another option. I have a list of items that sell cheap and I use those in the search box; nine times out of ten I come across something else selling cheap. If you notice something consistently showing up at a below-normal price in players shops you are going to have to put on your detective hat. That item could be part of the daily trivia question or a site event. The most common cause of a massive price drop is when there is a prize rotation at Key Quest or some type of site event like the current one involving faerie quest where you can get a free daily prize just for visiting the page.

Don't Ignore The Obvious: When there is a site event that causes the prices to drop, don't waste your time complaining. If you have 100 of an item in your SDB and suddenly they are only worth a fraction of what you paid don't worry. Chances are it will rebound so use the time to buy more of them. Not every item is going to rebound immediately, some things can take months or years. Example: The extremely cheap selling books that are currently given out with Key Quest prizes can be found for 1 - 5 NP; eventually they will get removed from the prize rotation and the price will start to go up. Why and How?Why - supply and demand. How? Because there are always new people joining the site and looking for books to read to their pets. Who knows, they might even get retired when they are taken out of the Key Quest rotation.

There are no shortcuts to getting to the Ultimate Riches! interest level at the National Neopian Bank; making sure you collect your interest every day can be another way to get some extra NP when there are tons of things you want to invest in. Right now my current daily interest is 7,486 NP but that goes up a few NP every day; over the course of a year I am making 2,732,278 NP just for clicking on a button. Of course that number increases when I add NP to my account but I always have enough in my Shop Till so I don't have to make a withdrawal from the bank.