Shop Running

Shop running is the simplest form of GE arbitrage: buy items from NPC shops at their fixed price, then sell on the Grand Exchange at the market price. Because the NPC price is fixed and the GE price is almost always higher, this creates a guaranteed margin with zero price risk.

Unlike flipping, you don't need to discover margins or worry about price movement. The trade-off is that shop running requires active gameplay — physically visiting shops and world hopping — rather than passively waiting for GE offers to fill.

The catch is that other players are buying from the same shops. The competition ratio measures how crowded a shop item is:

competition_ratio = GE_daily_volume / shop_daily_supply

A ratio below 1.0 means more shop supply than demand — the item is uncrowded and you can reliably fill your inventory. A ratio above 1.0 means more players are buying than the shop can supply — expect empty shelves on many worlds.

Some popular items are massively oversubscribed. Blood runes, for example, have competition ratios between 5x and 46x, meaning you will frequently hop to worlds with zero stock.

Each game world has an independent shop inventory. To maximize items per hour, you hop between worlds buying from the same shop. The key calculation:

worlds_needed = ceil(28 / stock_per_world)

With 28 inventory slots and roughly 15 seconds per world hop (including the hop timer, loading, and running to the shop), you can estimate runs per hour. A shop selling 10 items per world means 3 worlds per inventory, or about 45 seconds per trip to fill.

Factor in bank trips (depositing inventory and returning) to get a realistic GP/hr estimate. Shops near banks (like the Rune shop in the Mage Arena bank) are far more efficient than remote shops.

Raw GP/hr calculations assume you fill every purchase. In practice, competition reduces your fill rate. The adjustment:

adj_factor = 1 / max(1, competition_ratio)

If the competition ratio is 5, your adjusted GP/hr is only 20% of the theoretical maximum. An item showing 500K GP/hr with 5x competition is realistically 100K GP/hr or less.

This is why the Money Making page shows both raw and adjusted figures. Always sort by adjusted GP/hr to see what you will actually earn in practice.

Analysis of 53 shop-sold items shows that only 18 have a competition ratio below 1.0, meaning they are genuinely uncrowded. These are the items worth prioritizing.

The best shop runs share common traits: the shop is near a bank or teleport, the stock per world is high (fewer hops needed), and the competition ratio is low. Items where all three conditions are met can yield 300K–1M+ GP/hr with minimal effort.

Avoid chasing the highest raw margin if the competition ratio is above 2–3x. Your time is better spent on a lower-margin item you can actually buy in volume. Check the Shop Runs page for real-time competition ratios and adjusted earnings.