Oblivion:Commerce

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Contents 1 Base Price 1.1 Zero-value Items 2 Non-negotiable Prices 3 Merchants' Gold

[edit] Base Price

In Oblivion every item has a base price that is listed in the inventory. The prices provided in all of the tables on this website are base prices.

However, you will generally never be able to buy or sell items for their base price. When interacting with merchants, you need to haggle with them to negotiate the price at which they will agree to buy or sell items. If you are selling an item, you will always receive less than the base price. If you are buying an item, you will always pay more than the base price. You can think of this as the merchant's profit margin. The only exception is once your Mercantile skill reaches 100 (without the help of Fortify Skill effects): you are then able to buy and sell items at their base price. Haggling is governed by your Mercantile skill and is described in more detail on the Mercantile page.

For some items, such as Spells and upgrades for Houses you never see the base prices of the items (i.e., after you have purchased them, you do not see their price listed in your inventory). However, base prices are still defined for each of these items (and are the prices listed at the provided links); these base prices are adjusted by haggling in the same way as all other items in the game.

[edit] Zero-value Items

You will notice items in your inventory that have a base price of zero. Most of these fall in the category of Clutter. If you try to "sell" any of these items to a merchant, you will in fact be giving them away. (You do not gain any Mercantile points for giving items away). Many Quest Items also have zero value (as well as zero weight). You can not even try to sell these items (they do not appear in your inventory when you are negotiating with a merchant), nor can you drop them. They must remain in your inventory until you have completed the related quest.

[edit] Non-negotiable Prices

There are a limited number of instances where you can not negotiate the price, typically involving services rather than items:

• Prices of Houses. (although all¹ house upgrades are normal sales, subject to haggling)
• Purchasing Horses.
• Armor and Weapon repair services.
• Magical item recharging services.
• Beds (i.e., a room for the night).
• Skill Training prices are fixed at 10 times your current skill level.
• Item enchanting and spell making at the Arcane University.
• Buying lockpicks from Armand Christophe during the quest May the Best Thief Win.

¹Except for the Thieves Den official plugin, where all the upgrades have a fixed price.

[edit] Merchants' Gold

When you are interacting with any merchant, their available gold will be shown in the bottom right corner of the screen (these values are also listed on the Merchants page and on the individual merchants' pages). This is not the total gold that the merchant has available, but rather the amount the merchant is willing to pay on a single transaction.

For example, say you are selling five expert retorts (base price 500 gold) to a merchant for 375 gold each. If the merchant has only 800 available gold, you will not be able to sell all five at once: a warning message pops up that the merchant does not have enough gold. All you need to do is just sell them two at a time, and you'll end up 1875 gold richer.

As the game progresses, you will start to collect valuable loot that exceeds any merchant's available gold. 1200 gold is the maximum gold available from any merchant and 1500 gold is the maximum from the highest level fence Fathis Ules, and those merchants typically have the highest Mercantile skills, with the exception of Varel Morvayn in Anvil.

A number of merchants with 2000 gold have been added by Official Plug-Ins. These are Aurelinwae (Wizard's Tower), Nilphas Omellian (Fighter's Stronghold), and Rowley Eardwulf (Vile Lair).

Reaching Expert level Mercantile skill allows you to invest in a shop to increase the available gold by 500 and reaching Master in mercantile adds 500 gold to every shop (you may still invest after reaching Master thereby increasing available gold by 1000). However, ultimately many of the expensive items that you find can never be sold for anything close to their full value.