Being profitable isn't enough...

Now that I'm back producing T2 items, I updated my own spreadsheets to check profitability and got cracking on manufacturing the most attractive looking items. More recently I've obviously been trying to sell them, and since I've managed to almost double my output, it strikes me that there's more to building than just choosing the most profitable items. Once you can produce a decent volume, you have to really worry about how fast you can sell.

So I played about with my spreadsheet a bit and came out with this:

To explain as simply as possible:

• The Y axis (side) is just the daily sales volume in Jita. (I changed it into a logarithmic scale only because it's easier to view the output). Further up the graph = higher number of units sold per day.
• The X axis (bottom) is the millions of isk per hour profit I make. This is calculated by dividing the profit of the item by the time it takes to build. Further to the right = more profitable.
• Each little blue diamond is one item I can make. They are not labelled here because I'm not giving away all my secrets! The point of this post is to show you how to build useful tools, not give out freebie advice.

So in the end we have 4 quadrants, high volume/high profit quadrant (top right) containing the best items to make.

The most profitable items don't sell many units per day, so I've got a bit of an overstock of them that will probably take me a while to shift. They end up in the bottom right quadrant - low volume but high profit. I do want to keep manufacturing them, but if I devoted all my slots to that I'd make more than 10 times what I could sell and end up with a lot of T2 stuff hanging around my hangar floor.

Building a spreadsheet like this is extremely helpful when deciding what to manufacture - it wasn't until building this that I can really focus my efforts. If you know how profitable your items are (and you should!) then all you need to do extra is find a source for the volumes. I used Eve Tools. It's really not hard to do.

I hope this sort of analysis helps other budding Eve entrepreneurs!