Start with the decision, not the price
A pasted cargo list may contain a mixture of minerals, ships, modules and salvage. Before you calculate a total, decide what that total should represent: selling immediately into available buy orders, placing sell orders and waiting, replacing the inventory through sell orders, or moving it to another hub. Those choices can produce very different figures from the same inventory.
For a quick cash estimate, the prices that existing buyers are offering matter more than the prices sellers are asking. For a patient sale, you need to consider fees, fill time, competition, the quantity actually wanted and how often you would adjust the order. A replacement-cost calculation answers a third question: what would you pay to acquire these items now?
Try a real, prefilled inventory lookup
Open this three-item mineral appraisal in Price Checker. The page will load Tritanium, Pyerite and Mexallon with quantities in the Jita/Forge region. You can then change the region, choose the pricing method and inspect individual line items. It uses whatever market data the live service currently has; nothing in the example below claims to represent today's prices.
Try removing a mineral, doubling one quantity or changing the region. If the overall value changes unexpectedly, inspect the line-item warnings and compare a single mineral using Market Search. A quantity-aware comparison is usually more informative than treating every unit as though it could be filled at one best-price order.
Worked example: the more expensive option can pay almost the same
The following is a teaching example with invented prices and assumed fees, not a live EVE quote or a recommendation to place an order. Imagine you hold 10,000 units of an item. Immediate buyers offer 5.10 ISK per unit. Sell orders appear at 5.60 ISK per unit, but the sell-order route also has a combined 4.6% fee assumption and a 1,500 ISK total transportation cost.
| Scenario | Calculation | Illustrative outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Immediate sale | 10,000 × 5.10 | 51,000 ISK before any applicable sale deductions |
| Patient sell-order gross | 10,000 × 5.60 | 56,000 ISK |
| Sell-order fees | 56,000 × 4.6% | 2,576 ISK cost |
| Patient net after hauling | 56,000 − 2,576 − 1,500 | 51,924 ISK |
| Extra return vs displayed immediate figure | 51,924 − 51,000 | 924 ISK, before any immediate-sale fees |
A higher displayed price yielded only a small premium in this constructed comparison. Even that premium depends on the order filling. In a real comparison, apply the correct taxes and costs to both routes, and check order quantities, range, expiration and the risk of repricing.
Want to change the assumptions? Use the interactive sell-now versus sell-order worksheet to enter your own quantity, prices, fees and hauling cost.
Walk through the appraisal before acting
- Paste the exact inventory. Preserve quantities and spelling from EVE; correct any unresolved items before accepting a total.
- Choose the destination you can actually use. Jita is a common baseline, but another hub may be more practical if the cargo is already nearby.
- Select a pricing basis. Know whether your displayed total is an instant sale, an asking price or another valuation method.
- Inspect outliers. A single expensive module or a thinly traded item can dominate a basket and exaggerate the value you can realize.
- Check order depth and freshness. A visible best price for one unit may not cover thousands; published market information can also be stale by the time you transact.
- Account for moving and selling. Include fees, hauling, collateral, jump fuel where relevant, route risk and the time you will spend.
- Compare alternatives. If a mineral may be more valuable as an input to industry, or an ore may be better refined, inspect those outputs separately instead of blending them into one headline appraisal.
When to discard a result
Reject an estimate if the tool failed to resolve an item, the market had no meaningful orders for the selected region, the displayed quote covers far less volume than you hold, or you selected a hub where you would never realistically trade. Look for error messages and data-age indicators. An output marked as unavailable is not permission to substitute zero or a guessed price.
For buying, the relevant executable side of the market is reversed: you consume sellers' asks, not buyers' bids. For very large orders, ask whether your purchase would move the market. There is no single universal value for inventory apart from the plan you have for it.
Next: read how depth and spread work, or use Reprocessing Center when your basket includes ore.