Trading - Blueprints - 1st research batch

I still had some unresearched BPOs from 2010 lying around, so I’d start with those. Also had to train one of my trade toons. I stopped training Rtb that has 110mil SP and was training for “irrelevant skill Lvl 5” and during about 1 month got the following skills trained in one of my trade toons:

-        - Advanced Laboratory Operation lvl 4

-        - Laboratory Operation lvl 5

-        - Metallurgy lvl 5

-        - Research lvl 5

-        - Scientific Networking lvl 2

-        - Corporation Contracting lvl 4

-        - Contracting lvl 4

This pretty much means I have 10 research slots. At the present time I won’t bother with BPCs because they really seem to not make much Isk per unit. You can check my sale/profits in the next spreadsheet.

 Some quick notions:

- Job cost is considered “0” because it’s so damn cheap it ain’t worth me bothering about it;

- BPO cost was considered at current Jita prices. Some are seeded by NPCs and some are seeded by players, and even though those particular BPOs were bought back in 2010, I doubt prices changed much.

- Contracts can’t really be changed the way market orders are, so a bad initial price will make them be “in stasis” for 15 days.

1st thing to notice (and I already kinda expected it) is that % Profit is useless data. Sure, it’s cool to sell something at 2000% profit, but it might still be a low amount of Isk, so I’ll prolly just delete that field in a future update of the spreadsheet. The data that I’m really looking for is “Total Profit”and “Isk/day”. The “Isk/day” takes in account the time the BPO took to research and the time it took to sell, therefore it’s also important to know how many times it was put on contracts, before someone actually took it.

Some BPOs managed to be sold a bit overpriced (like the Reactor Control Unit) but I bet it was more due to temporary offer/demand circumstances rather than it being a special ultra profitable item overlooked by the competition.

Also initially I tried to sell the researched BPOs in the same system where I researched them, in order to avoid more clicks and avoid paying Red Frog Freight to transport them to a Hub, but soon became obvious it was NOT gonna work. All BPOs, except for the first 2 contracts, were sold in Jita.

I honestly expected a bigger difficulty selling the BPOs. Research time, although
“lengthy” is a controlled factor. Selling something in contracts is totally random, and I expected more contracts to end their time limit without being sold.

Nevertheless my inexperience in this area, I managed to make around 400mil profit in about 2 month, totally AFK and with a few dozen clicks! Considering this is a startup project, I’m taking the results as being very positive.

Now… this was the easy part… In fact, I researched a bunch of old, in stock, BPOs. Here are my main concerns for the future:

- Deciding what BPOs I’m gonna research on a regular basis;

- Figuring out what’s more profitable (isk/day) to research: 3, 7, 11 or 23 days BPOs;

- Figuring out if I’m gonna have a bottleneck using contracts as my sales system (BPOs not selling fast enough and starting to stockpile in my hangar)

- Managing inventory and resupply operations. With market items it’s quite easy because I can just export my orders into Google Docs… Can’t do that with contract to my knowledge. Maybe a 3rd party program like EVE Assets can help…

- Managing costs of hauling BPOs from Jita to the research system, and back. No I ain’t undocking to move crap around, so stop giving me those looks!

Still the initial result convinced me to train 3 more toons into this Research BPO thingie. Next step is to develop my Integrated BPO Research Strategy… or something…