Jita is the hub of commerce in EVE Online. Everything moves through here. If trade is the life-blood of EVE Online, Jita is the heart. There's no shortage of opportunities to be had here, and no shortage of scamming scoundrels, either.

The best thing about Jita is that within the natural ebb and flow of trade there is plenty of room for small advancement, even for poorer players. Load up on a few of these, and resell them at a likely spot like Agil or a null-sec system of your choice.

The crux of bargain-hunting is finding ways to get things at either cut-rates, or at fair prices that can easily be flipped at a profit. Some of my favorite ways to do this are as follows:

5. Datacores

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style="font-style: italic;">Jita is full of opportunities. Grab one by the horns.

Certain commodities in EVE Online run based on their buy orders rather than their sell orders. Datacores are particularly subject to this, because players tend to cash in their R&D every few months, and not want to fuss about selling them. The end result is that if you nurse a buy order for even a few days, you are likely to see your order filled. This is particularly true at present, when the price of most datacore varieties is plummeting, fast.

4. Ice Products

Another product whose market is mostly determined by buy orders, various kinds of ice are mined en masse by dedicated concerns, often involving illegal botting. For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, the price of the isotopes (helium, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, respectively) has plummeted over the past year. If I had to make a guess, it would be that botters found better things to do, and that advances in botting technology made running missions and killing NPCs in null-sec more profitable. The other possibility is that this is a side-effect of Hulkageddon.

In any case, the price of these isotopes is on its way back up to former levels. Liquid ozone and strontium clathrates also appear to be following the same trend, though heavy water is not. This is likely because large amounts of heavy water are produced more or less as a byproduct of mining other things. This whole situation makes ice products seem like a sure bargain, provided the trend continues upwards for a bit, and stock can be resold before the prices collapse again.

3. Implants

Implants are often sold to buy orders because of the way they are produced: players will cash in all of their loyalty points gained by running missions, and be eager to sell the resulting implants as quickly as possible. It is essentially the same situation as with datacores, about. There are also groups that farm implants aggressively, and this makes the market for the more popularp ones very competitive. The resulting frustration makes Jita-averse players quick to sell, even if they lose several million ISK by doing so. The higher-priced implants that cost hundreds of millions of ISK are especially prone to this.

Another neat situation here is that "pirate" faction implants are available only via contracts, rather than the market. Those implants are often sold to "want to buy" contracts, especially if there are numerous sell contracts up already. Try putting up a buy contract for a popular faction implant like "Zor's Custom Navigation Hyper-Link" with a few million knocked off, and don't be surprised when it flips pretty quickly.

2. Cheap Ship Blueprints

There is a profundity of ship blueprint copies for sale in Jita. Nearly every variety of ship is represented, and the most popular varieties are often sold at incredibly low prices. Take drakes for example. Everybody needs drakes. Buy copies of researched drake blueprints in Jita and resell them with a 20% markup. Easy as pie. There are dozens of likely ships, depending on where you live. Live in Angel space? Buy tempest blueprints. Live in Sansha space? Buy apocalypse blueprints.

Once at your desired destination, you can easily resell the blueprints via contracts, or given a steady mineral supply, produce with them. Better yet, do both. Just be sure not to flood the market on any particular ship.

1. Whatever Comes Your Way

The new advanced contract searching feature was introduced with the final part of the Incursion expansion. It allows a true sorting of contracts by price, something that only was only partially true, prior. People put up really cool, strange stuff on contracts. Sometimes it is for such incredibly cheap prices that you can't help but assume that it was a mistake. In any case, try sorting contracts by price, and only listing things that cost a million ISK or less. Then peruse to your heart's content.

Think of it as a form of window shopping. And if you find a faction module for sale that clearly had a zero shaved off the price by accident, hop onto the Ten Ton Hammer forums and tell us about it.


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Last Updated: Mar 13, 2016

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