How do you Define Niche?

[Gremlin]

I'm thinking of writing a glossary to help people understand what marketeers are talking about. I'm not very sure how to define niche. People seem to use it in different ways so I thought I would seek the wisdom of the ebil ones.

 

What's your definition of niche?

 

Are any of the following usages correct or incorrect?

1. A niche is a specific type of item that can be bought or sold. e.g.  Blaster's Wrath: Acc/Dam/End Recipes, Resurgence Inspirations
2. A niche is a trading strategy that involves a limited set of recipes, IOs etc. e.g. Converting ATOs, Crafting Panacea Procs
3. Flipping purples isn't a niche. It's a strategy.
4. A niche is not a niche if everyone's doing it
5. A niche is not a niche unless it's profitable
6. A niche doesn't exist unless someone is working it

 

Thanks.

[Yomo Kimyata]

I think that this is going to be up for interpretation and there may not be *one* definition.  So I'll be happy to adopt whatever you come up with!  In very general terms I think of it as a subsegment of the overall market by set category, or alternately as a specific strategy.  The former could be "Aegis IOs", or the latter could be "rare roulette."  Maybe those are two different terms.

 

I think it varies, but specifically to your points:

1.  Sometimes.  For example, I have a guy who only deals with Kinetic Combat IOs.  He buys KC recipes sometimes, he buys cheap crafted KC IOs.  Every once in a while, I log him in and put a lot of content into the market.  I rarely cut it down to a specific IO in a set, although I do it with some procs.

2.  Often.  For example, I have a gal who deals with Serendipity and Gift of the Ancients as part of the overall Defense Complex.  Usually she crafts recipes and converts the IOs, sometimes all the way to LotG, sometimes not.  She rarely trades, unless it's bottom feeding on crafted IOs.

3.  I can see it as a niche.  I think of flipping, or trading as I prefer to call it, as a strategy.  But focusing on purples alone makes it niche-y enough to me.

4.  I still think it's a niche.

5.  With very few exceptions, it's difficult to find something that is NOT profitable.  Although my brief "I'm going to make Entropic Chaos a *thing*" strategy certainly didn't send any of my alts to finishing school.  I'm still finding inventory left over from that.

6.  There's a limited number of things to do in the AH, and it's fair to say that everything has been looked at and if it's sexy, someone has worked it, even if they are not working it now.

 

EDIT:  additional thoughts on profitability.  Some of my favorite niches aren't the most profitable, but I like them because they're intellectually challenging.  One in particular is like cracking petroleum.  I take a really unheralded segment and convert it.  One by product is a decent proc, but the rest of the set is crap so the non-procs go into the rare roulette bin and I sell the proc.  Another byproduct is a good proc, so I convert the other parts of the set into the proc and sell them.  And another byproduct is a good set that sells pretty well across the board.  I'm not making 5mm a trade, but maybe in the 1-3mm range.

 

My 2 inf.  Happy hunting!

Edited April 24, 2020 by Yomo Kimyata

[tidge]

7 hours ago, Gremlin said:

I'm thinking of writing a glossary to help people understand what marketeers are talking about. I'm not very sure how to define niche. People seem to use it in different ways so I thought I would seek the wisdom of the ebil ones.

 

What's your definition of niche?

 

Are any of the following usages correct or incorrect?

1. A niche is a specific type of item that can be bought or sold. e.g.  Blaster's Wrath: Acc/Dam/End Recipes, Resurgence Inspirations
2. A niche is a trading strategy that involves a limited set of recipes, IOs etc. e.g. Converting ATOs, Crafting Panacea Procs
3. Flipping purples isn't a niche. It's a strategy.
4. A niche is not a niche if everyone's doing it
5. A niche is not a niche unless it's profitable
6. A niche doesn't exist unless someone is working it

1. Seems too specific to be correct

2. Seems too general to be correct

3. Could be a market niche. See below

4. I think it could still be a market niche, but the behavior isn't niche.

5. Incorrect.

6. Hmmm.

 

For me, a Market Niche is a specific place where I specifically 'start', shooting for a specific result that I am comfortable with the average return I am going to get from that place.

 

I'll invent a make-believe market niche that doesn't currently work (because I'm only mostly Ebil^TM). If I have a feel that a lot of builds are going to pay a decent price for Celerity +Stealth,  I would consider this a niche if I purposely started with the Running pool (presumably Quickfoot) and craft/convert until I 'rolled' into +Stealth.  I have presumably done the math and recognized that the return on the pieces I am crafting is work enough more than my investment to make it worthwhile. I want it to be profitable, but that doesn't mean it is. A market niche is a limited space where the marketeer is comfortable working that market element.

 

For example: The "Number Available" for most "proc" pieces often FAR exceeds the demand for the piece. I can see why some players might think that the "proc" is the most valuable piece in the set (I blame Panacea and Performance Shifter) and so consider these to be valuable market niches... but in reality the number of valuable proc pieces is quite limited.

 

I think selling Converters in the Auction House would be considered the simplest example of a market niche. At most there is only one activity to perform (outside the marketplace) and the only decision is literally the lowest sale price.

[Gremlin]

Thanks for your answers. Here's my suggested definition based on your thoughts. I've pulled out "strategy" as a separate term as it seems useful. How do you all feel about this?

 

Strategy
A general method of making inf by trading. A strategy determines what sort of items to buy and how to transform them into the items that will be sold. Strategies may involve specific, broad groups of items. e.g. Rare roulette, crafting recipes, converting purples

 

Niche
N.B. This term does not have a clear definition that's shared by the market community. Please take this definition with a large pinch of salt.

 

At it's loosest, a trader's niche means "what I'm doing on the market" or "the items I'm trading". The items are usually recipes and IOs. The trading strategy may be considered part of the niche.

 

Here's a narrower definition. A niche defines the items that a trader is working with. e.g. "My niche is Panaceas" or "I'm working cheap defense sets." The niche may be a single item, a handful of sets or some other small group of items. People often mention a niche and a strategy together but the strategy doesn't define the niche; the items do. Traders know the prices and sale patterns of the items in their niche.