Every item in every city has two prices: what sellers ask and what buyers offer. Most bad trades come from reading the wrong one, comparing two different items, or trusting a price that was true yesterday. The Market Explorer shows both sides for one item in every city, each with the time it was seen.
The two sides of the book
- The lowest sell order is the cheapest price any seller is asking. Buy instantly and you pay this.
- The highest buy order is the best price any buyer is offering. Sell instantly and you get this.
The gap between them is the spread. The Market Explorer shows it as sell minus buy, as a share of the buy price. Instant trades give the spread away for speed. Orders capture it and cost you time plus a 2.5% setup fee each, and every sale pays 4% tax with Premium or 8% without. An order-to-order flip needs a spread of about 9.6% with Premium just to break even, which the market flipping guide works through.
Match the item before you compare
Two prices only compare when everything else matches:
- Server. Europe, Americas and Asia are separate economies. Outpost's region switch changes every price on the page.
- Tier and enchantment. A T6.1 sword and a T6 sword are different items with different books. In item IDs the enchantment follows an @: T6_MAIN_SWORD is the flat Broadsword, T6_MAIN_SWORD@1 the 6.1.
- Quality. Normal, Good, Outstanding, Excellent and Masterpiece each trade separately. A Masterpiece listing tells you nothing about the Normal price.
- City. Each royal city, Brecilien and Caerleon keep separate books, and the Black Market in Caerleon is its own buyer. The Outlands' Smuggler's Network is another separate market, linked across every den.
Outpost keeps each price with its own city, quality and side of the book, and never blends a Lymhurst sell order with a Martlock buy order into one figure. When the quality you asked for has no data, it shows the other qualities beside it with their own city and time instead of swapping one in.
Check how old the price is
A price is a snapshot of the moment someone saw it. A sell order seen ten minutes ago is a good guide. One seen two days ago may have filled, been cancelled or been undercut.
In the Market Explorer every price carries its age, and the exact UTC time on hover. Anything older than an hour gets a Stale chip, and the city table's header tells you how many orders are older than an hour. Buy and sell sides keep separate times, so a fresh sell order can sit next to a stale buy order for the same item in the same city. If the cheaper city's price is much older, treat the comparison as a guess and confirm it in game before you ride across the map.
For trend, open Research price history to see how the average moved over the last 7 or 30 days. One spike in a quiet market is often a single sale, not a new price.
Unavailable is not zero
When nobody has uploaded a price for an item in a city, Outpost shows a dash and Unavailable. It means there is no data. It does not mean the item is free, and it does not prove the market is empty. A price observed as 0 is treated the same way. Calculators keep a result unavailable when any input is missing, so a gap never turns into a fake profit, and a price you type yourself is labelled as yours.
Where the prices come from
Players upload prices to the Albion Online Data Project with a client that reads the market windows they open. Busy items in busy cities update often. Rare items, quiet cities and the Asia server can go a long time between uploads, and exact-quality T8 gaps are common. The data is crowd-sourced and comes with no guarantee.
A listing does not prove stock or volume. The order may hold a single item, or another player may take it first. For anything expensive, open the market in game and confirm the order before you spend silver. The game's own item details window has shown an estimated market value per item and per stack since Radiant Wilds, a useful second opinion.
Reading the Black Market
The Black Market in Caerleon buys equipment and hands it out as loot to mobs and chests across the world. It only buys, so in Outpost its price is a buy order you can sell into, never a price you can buy at. A sale there pays sales tax and no setup fee, because you sell instantly. Its demand moves with what players loot and lose, so a high Black Market price on a niche item can vanish after a few sales. Check the time on it like any other price, and compare it with the Caerleon market's own buy orders before you craft for it.
Three checks before any trade
- Is this the right server, tier, enchantment and quality?
- Which side am I trading against, the sell orders or the buy orders?
- How old is each price, and is the item selling in volume?
Then look the item up in the Market Explorer, scan a city pair in Market flipping, and count the fees with How to calculate real profit.
Game balance changes between patches. Check requirements, yields and costs in game.
