The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind Hints

Merchant Tips

• 1 of 8: Always let your fatigue bar fully regenerate before you do any buying or selling of any kind with anyone (that includes buying training). The lower your fatigue is, the higher their prices will be.
• 2 of 8: That also goes for their disposition toward you. When you find a merchant you want to do business with, you should first admire and/or bribe his disposition up into the 80's at least, preferably all the way to 100.
• 3 of 8: If getting a merchant's disposition up is a problem, you can temporarily raise it by selling him items one at a time. After each successful sale, his disposition will have a temporary +1 increase. This increase vanishes when you say "goodbye" and then talk to him again, but you can use it by first selling him lots of cheap items one at a time and then selling him a big-dollar item once his disposition is way up. (Or sell him a one-gold item, buy it back, sell it to him again, buy it back again, etc.)
• 4 of 8: Your Mercantile skill has a big impact on prices, so get it trained up as soon as you can. A merchant's Mercantile skill is also a factor, so you could do a bit of comparison shopping to see who has the best prices once you get all their dispositions up to 100. (This is especially useful when selling lots of valuable things.)
• 5 of 8: The fact that it can be tedious to get every merchant's disposition up to 100 is why you should pick a few certain merchants to always (or at least usually) be the ones to sell stuff to. The merchants should be in a place that's easy to access via fast travel of some sort so you can get there quickly. Once you have those merchants picked out, get all their dispositions up to 100 and then *never* steal anything from anywhere in their shops. (Or at least don't ever steal anything from them that they could ever buy back, since that would complicate dealings with them. You can always steal potion ingredients from a basket in an armor merchant's shop since he'd never be willing to buy any potion ingredients, etc.)
• 6 of 8: You've gotta watch the whole disposition thing, though. There's a bug in the game that may make merchants offer you less money for something you're selling when their dispositions are higher. I've even seen this happen at the beginning of the game with a character who started with a Mercantile of 40. When selling items, you might want to experiment a bit with higher and lower dispositions to see which works better, especially once your Mercantile skill gets to 40 or higher.
• 7 of 8: When you buy or sell, you can alter the suggested price by clicking on the little up and down arrows next to it. Do so to get a little more money for what you sell, and to pay a little less for what you buy. The main thing to note about this is that if the merchant refuses your adjusted offer the first time you make it, you can keep clicking on the "Offer" button over and over again, and it might be accepted eventually. However, note that each time an offer is refused, the merchant's disposition will go down temporarily, so don't try to demand too radical a price for anything. (On the other hand, the more you push it, the quicker your Mercantile skill will increase. You can practice it by doing lots of buying at way low prices and selling at way high prices.)
• 8 of 8: There are two special merchants in the game who don't pay any attention to disposition, Mercantile skill, or any of that other stuff -- they simply buy and sell items at cost. Read all about them in the hints about selling big-dollar items.
  • How can I sell big-dollar items to merchants?

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