How long it lasts
The shop sits behind a quest line, a zone, or a tribal reputation rank the buyer hasn't finished. They can't buy it at any price.
Updated October 11, 2026
Quick answer: Some NPC vendors sell items for a fixed gil price that resell much higher on the market board. Vendor flipping is buying those, listing them, and keeping the spread after the 5% tax. Gated shops (tribe, event) keep the best margins because fewer players can reach the supply. The reverse, selling cheap board items back to NPCs, also works.
Somewhere in Final Fantasy XIV a merchant sells an item for a fixed handful of gil, and players are paying many times that for it on the market board. Buying from the NPC and listing it yourself is the simplest gil method in the game.
No crafting, no gathering, no combat. The whole skill is knowing which items, on your world, right now.
It feels like it shouldn't work. The item has a fixed price and unlimited supply, so why would anyone pay more?
Because the price tag isn't the real cost. The real cost is knowing the item exists, knowing which NPC in which zone stocks it, having that zone unlocked, and making the trip. Players buying on the board are paying you for all four.
The gaps that create margin, roughly in order of how long they last:
The shop sits behind a quest line, a zone, or a tribal reputation rank the buyer hasn't finished. They can't buy it at any price.
It costs scrips, Grand Company seals, tomestones or tribal currency, not gil. Selling it really converts that currency into gil.
The vendor is in a corner of a zone nobody visits. It pays well until enough people notice.
A crafter mid-batch will happily overpay to skip a round trip. The thinnest margin of the four, but it refills constantly.
Every board sale is taxed 5%, and that comes off the sale price, not off your profit. So the real per-unit number is:
A 1,000 gil item bought for 200 nets 750, not 800. That 5% barely matters on a wide flip and quietly kills a narrow one. A 6% spread is a 1% business.
This is what makes vendor flipping different from every other kind of trading. Gil vendors never run out and never need to restock. That has two consequences:
You can't corner anything.There's no scarcity to exploit. If the item is profitable, it's profitable for everyone who looks.
Margin decays toward the effort.An ungated, well-known vendor item gets competed down until it's only worth it to someone already standing there.
That's why gated items matter so much. A flip protected by a reputation rank or an unusual currency stays profitable far longer, because few people can undercut you.
Categories that come up again and again, on every world:
DyesBought constantly and in bulk, and half the game can't be bothered to find the dye vendor.
Housing and furnishing goodsDecorators buy in quantity and don't price-shop.
Crafting reagentsAnything a crafter burns through by the stack. They're buying to save a trip, every day.
Minions and orchestrion rollsCollectors pay a real premium to skip content they don't want to do.
Glamour from old shopsTradeable looks from expansions most players have long since flown past.
Whatever your world wants todayThe categories above are a starting point. The live list below is the real answer.
That's the candidate pool in our vendor dataset. On any given day a small fraction of it is worth flipping on your world, and that's the kind of filtering worth handing to a tool.
Use Category to stick to one kind of item: Housing, Minions, Materials and so on. The NPC → Market: not on board mode shows vendor items with nothing listed on your world, ranked by recent demand.
Handy when you're already standing next to a merchant and want to know what to grab.
For the general preset filters, see profit vs. units/day presets.
Almost every item has a second price attached: what an NPC will pay you for it. It's usually far below market, so it usually doesn't matter.
Every so often a market price falls under that buy-back price. Someone dumps a stack to clear retainer space, an undercut war spirals, a hoard gets liquidated.
Buy those listings, walk to any merchant, sell them. Selling to an NPC is never taxed, and there's no waiting for a buyer. The gil is instant and the trade carries no market risk.
17,117 marketable items have a buy-back price, so the search space is large and the windows are short. Check back a few times a day.
Set your world first: the Server badge at the top of the site, then Change. Vendor prices are the same everywhere, but board prices aren't, so the whole flip list is world-specific.
Put this into practice with live market-board prices for your world:
NPC ↔ market flipsBoth directions, ranked by live profit.Open → Vendor & item databaseEvery merchant's stock with current market values.Open → Cross-server arbitrageBuy cheaper on another world, sell at home.Open →Find vendor flips on your world → Flipping & arbitrage guide →
More guides: flipping & arbitrage · undercutting & pricing · the market board sweet spot · how to make gil (every method)
XIV Profitability is a free, fan-made tool. Not affiliated with Square Enix. Prices via Universalis. FINAL FANTASY XIV © SQUARE ENIX CO., LTD.