Trading

Trading is a feature that allows the player to buy and sell items at a shop for inventory or profit. Most stores use gols as a trading currency, although some stores also use other items, such as Data Discs and various badges. Additionally, stores that use gols as currency use market price, which determines how much items are sold for on a daily basis.

Market price
''This section puts aside any other price modifiers. Actual in-game figures will take all modifiers into account.''

Market price is a value that alters the price of an item during a transaction. It only affects buying and selling items for Gols, not other Currencies. If the market price is 100%, items will be bought and sold for their full buy and sell prices (listed on shop and item pages, and in-game infoboxes for items' sell values[ ]).

The current market price is visible in the upper right of the UI of all stores, and is shared between all stores for the current in-game day. This displayed market price is rounded to the nearest percent, while the game uses an unrounded value (with additional decimal places) to determine prices. All items being offered for sale in Gols will already have the market price (and any other modifiers) factored in when displaying prices.

Market prices above 100% indicate an above-average value for goods. Items sold by the store will be sold above their normal price, and items that the player sells will earn the player a better price. On these days, it is more favorable for the player to sell items to stores and less favorable than normal for the player to buy items from stores. Market prices below 100% indicate a below-average value for goods. Stores will sell their goods for cheaper prices, and offer less money to the player when the player sells his or her goods to the store.

The player can maximize profit and minimize losses by selling goods on days that have a high market price and buying goods on days that have a low market price. The player should keep in mind whether an item is seasonal or only sold in certain weather conditions, however, since the item might no longer be available if the player waits to buy it on another day. For examples of items only sold during different seasons, see the furniture sold by Best Brother.

It is not known for certain what factor or factors cause the market price to change. There are two prevailing theories that seek to explain it. The first is that each day the market prices change in correspondence to the season and weather. The second theory is that if the player buys items from the store, the market price percentage increases over time, and if the player sells items to the store, the market price decreases. It might also be a combination of the two, with buying and selling causing gradual up or down trends in the market and seasons and weather causing small daily fluctuations. More testing is needed.

Discounts
The player can get a discount at many of the stores by improving their Relationship with the store owner/clerk. Contrary to how market price functions, these discounts apply to all items the store sells and not just the gol priced items. Market price and relationship discounts get applied in a multiplicative fashion. For example, an item that normally sells for 100 will cost 64 if the market price is 80% and the player has a 20% discount from their relationship with the store owner. Likewise, the Business Mind skill works the same for items the store buys from the player: if the market price is 120% and the player has the maximum 8% bonus from Business Mind, then an item that normally sells for 100 will instead sell for 130 (with the value rounded up to the nearest whole number, from 129.6 to 130).

Ratios
Ratios are used to conduct fair trading. Ratios are fair trade defined as a quantitative relation between two amounts showing the number of times one value contains or is contained within the other: in other words, selling x amount of an item provides y amount of an item in return. Ratios are read as "x:y", or "x to y".

As a result, commonly gathered items, such as Wood, must be sold in higher quantities per 1 Gol. For example, the ratio of a store buying Wood is "2 Wood:1 Gol". This means that the player cannot sell less than 2 Wood in exchange for Gols, as this conducts unfair trading (though the player can exchange Wood and Stone in a 1:1 ratio at A&G Construction each day). Fair trading is also true for trading one rare item for a large quantity of one item.

Selling items to shops
Each store in Portia sells different items and buys back items in relation to the store type; for example, Alice's Flower Shop buys and sells floral but cannot buy non-floral related items from the player.

Most items have a sell price and can be sold to shops for gols. Item sell prices are affected by market price. Additionally, some extremely common items, such as Stone, can only be sold in more than a 1:1 item:gol in order to ensure fair trading.

To sell items to shops, the items to be sold must be in the player's inventory. Upon interacting with the shop, the player can select those items in their inventory menu (listed to the right of the shop inventory), then select Sell to sell the items.

To see which items each shop will buy, see Buybacks.

Inflation
All stores have a budgeted amount of Gols to buy from the player; this budget increases a small amount each day, which is the amount indicated in the Inflation field of each shop's page on this wiki. Upon reaching that budget, the store can no longer buys items from the player until the next day.