Albion Online Market Prices

How Albion Online market prices work

Albion Online has no official price API. Every price you see on this site, or on any other Albion price tool, was captured by a player who had a market window open at the time. That single fact explains most of what looks strange about market data: why one city has a price and the next does not, why a number can be hours old, and why two tools can disagree about the same item.

Why the Sell column is higher than the Buy column

This is the question people ask most, and it is not a bug. The two columns describe opposite sides of the same market.

Sellers ask more than buyers offer, so Sell sits above Buy on almost every item. The gap between them is the spread, and it is the whole basis of flipping: buy into the low side, sell into the high side, and keep the difference minus tax. The Flipper scans for items where that gap is wide enough to be worth the trip.

When the two cross - a buy order higher than the cheapest sell order - you are usually looking at two different cities, and that is a real arbitrage rather than an error.

Why a city shows a dash instead of a price

A blank is not an empty market. It means nobody running a data client has opened that market window recently enough for us to have a reading. Bridgewatch might have deep liquidity on an item while the same item shows nothing in Martlock, purely because no contributor has been standing in Martlock's marketplace lately.

Coverage is therefore thickest where players actually trade - Caerleon and the busier royal cities - and thinnest on low-volume items in quiet cities. Brecilien, being harder to reach, is usually the sparsest of the seven.

Price age matters more than price accuracy

Every price on this page carries the time it was captured, and old prices are dimmed rather than hidden. A three-day-old number is not wrong, it is just describing a market that has since moved on. For a heavily traded item that is often fine. For a thin one it can be badly out of date, which is exactly when a confident-looking figure is most dangerous.

We show the age instead of quietly hiding stale data, because knowing a price is twelve hours old is more useful than seeing nothing at all.

The three servers are separate economies

Americas, Europe and Asia each run their own markets with their own prices, their own liquidity and their own contributors. An item can be worth noticeably more on one than another, and prices never cross between them. Use the server switch in the header - reading Europe prices while playing on Americas is the most common way to plan a craft that turns out not to be profitable.

Spot prices, averages, and the Black Market

The default view shows live orders: what is on the market right now. Switch to Trends for a volume-weighted average over the last several days, which is the better basis when you are planning rather than buying. A single cheap listing can drag a spot price somewhere the market as a whole never went, and an average smooths that out.

The Black Market in Caerleon is listed separately for good reason. It is an NPC buyer rather than a player market, it only fills buy orders, and it prices at a different level from the royal cities. Averaging it in with the other cities would distort every number it touched. If you craft to sell there, the Black Market calculator models it properly.

Where our prices come from

Two sources, merged per item, per city, per quality, with the fresher reading winning.

This is the practical difference between Albion Codex and a tool that reads the public pool alone: when both have a price we take whichever is fresher, and when the public pool has nothing we can often still answer. Every contributor makes the map better for everyone using it.

Estimated prices, and why they are labelled

Some items almost never trade. Rather than show a permanent blank, we can estimate a value from the item's own price history and what it costs to craft. Those figures are marked Est. and carry a confidence level, and they are never mixed silently into an observed price. An estimate is a reasonable starting point for planning; it is not evidence that anyone paid that.

Turning a price into a decision

A price on its own rarely answers the question you actually have. If you are deciding whether to make something, the crafting calculators take these prices and net off materials, tax, return rate and your own Destiny Board specialisations - the last of which no other Albion tool accounts for. If you are moving goods between cities, the Transport calculator works in weight and carry capacity. If you want to understand how the prices themselves are gathered, the market data guide goes further than this page does.

Market Browser

Every figure here is derived from the game's own data and checked against real crafts. How we calculate.