Flipping items for profit on the Grand Exchange in Old School Runescape is easy and profitable money-making method if the correct steps are followed.
To start flipping, you can have any excess RuneScape gold, you have no matter how small, but with a large enough investment, millions of Gp can be earned per day in little to no time.
Choosing your flipping method
There are two main methods of flipping in Old School Runescape:
- High volume flipping, which is a low-risk low reward,
- Low-volume flipping, which is a high-risk & high reward method.
High volume flipping is flipping a large number of items for a small amount of profit per item.
Low volume flipping is flipping a single item or small batch of Items for a substantial profit per item.
High Volume Flipping
High Volume Flipping is the method mainly used by flippers without a large amount of OSRS gold to spare as it includes expected returns and short waits with little to no risk.
High volume flipping is flipping a large number of items that are cheap and frequently traded, such as food, potions, and runes.
To find an item to flip quickly, check the Old School Runescape Top 100 most frequently traded items page here http://services.runescape.com/m=itemdb_oldschool/top100?list=0.
Find an item that is above about 100 Gp and check its margins (see below for help with checking margins).
If the item has a substantial margin, add a buy order for that item for 1 Gp over the cost of what you sold it for to obtain the most profit.
If you are unable to buy your item anymore, you might have hit the buy limit for the RuneScape item, which will reset every 4 hours.
You can check this by searching for your item on the RuneScape wiki here: https://oldschool.runescape.wiki.
Another possibility is that somebody might have added a buy order for the item that is higher than yours.
In this case, you can choose to increase the price of your buy order or take the items you have now and cancel the buy order.
When your buy order is complete, or you are unable to obtain any more items, recheck your margins and add a sell order for 1 Gp less than what you just bought the item for.
For example, a player could buy 10,000 sharks for 1,000 Gp each after checking margins.
These margins could be buying for 999 Gp and selling for 1,011 each.
Once all of the sharks have been bought, margins can be checked once again if needed.
Next, the sharks could sell for 1,010 Gp each for a profit of 100,000 OldSchool RuneScape gold.
Low Volume Flipping
Low Volume flipping is often used by very experienced flippers to make large amounts of Gp but at the cost of significant investment, patience, and high risk.
Low volume flipping is similar to high volume flipping, but only a small amount of items are bought that are high cost.
Margin checking is often not economical due to its high cost for the costly items used in low volume flipping such as the Chamber of Xeric items, Theater of Blood Items, and other high-end PvM and PvP gear.
We recommend using ge-tracker.com to search for an item's prices.
Using a Ge tracker, you can get a vague value of an item's previous buying and selling price to place accurate buy and sell orders. When choosing an OSRS item, make sure an update is not coming out soon to nerf it or the content it excels at, or you could get stuck with millions of Gp lost.
When placing your buy order, you must understand that you might not see your return for a few hours or even days due to so little people trading these super high priced items, so if an item is not buying or selling soon enough, remember to have patience.
For example, a player could search on Ge Tracker for an item such as the Dragon claws, which looks like they could be bought for 55,000,000 Gp and sold for 56,500,000 Gp. This margin is significant, that can be taken advantage of.
They could buy in a buy offer for about 55,100,000 to make sure they are not undercut. This item will most likely take a while to buy, so some waiting is a must. When the RuneScape item does buy, recheck its predicted margins and sell it for around 56,400,000 Gp.
This method would allow for a substantial profit margin of 1,300,000 Gp for only a few minutes of work!
Checking Margins
Checking margins on your items is one of the most critical aspects of flipping. Checking margins shows how much profit can be made on a single OSRS item by subtracting the buy price from the selling price.
You can do this by going to the Grand Exchange and adding a very high priced offer for the item, then sell the item back to the Grand Exchange for a meager price.
Next, click the history tab in the top left-hand corner of the Grand Exchange interface to see how much the item bought and sold for. The margin number times the amount of the OldSchool RuneScape item you flip will give a reasonable estimation of your predicted profits. But you have to even this out with your GP invested.
Dividing your Gp profit by your Gp Invested will give you a value that shows how much Gp you are expected to make per Gp invested. The higher this value is, the better. This value must be paid close attention as it shows what items should and should not be invested in.
Tip: The formula for finding expected Gp profit per Gp invested is: (Gp invested) / (Buy price - Sell price) x (Amount of items flipping)
