Why are my enchanted items worth less and less?

There seems to be a lot of misinformation regarding this, including on the wikis. The price does not drop as your enchanting skill increases. I figured this out by gaining several skill points through disenchanting: none of my enchanted items lost value. They started losing value only after I created more items of the same enchantment. For example, if you enchant something with Turn Undead, all your weapons with that particular enchantment will lose value while all your apparel and weapons with a different enchantment will keep theirs. Additionally, this is done in steps, so you will not see a decrease after every enchantment.

TL; DR: When you flood the world with items of a particular enchantment, the price for all such items drops; all other items keep their value.

Edit: What further complicates things is that (as of 1.2) there's a bug upon loading a saved game. It looks like the prices of your items will not be updated and will remain at whatever they were before you loaded! To make the game recalculate and show the correct price for a class of items, it seems you need to make that particular enchantment again (other enchantments, changing item/character location, autotravel, etc. didn't seem to refresh the price).

And it's not only a display bug: you can exploit it by saving the game after you're done with your enchantments, loading a previous save, enchanting once in order to update prices, and loading your current save again to sell items at higher prices.

Bottom line: prices of enchanted items are completely broken and in certain cases you may wish to restart the whole game before loading.

After taking an arrow in the knee I decided to do some mass enchanting at my house in solitude. I noticed that with every new banishing iron dagger I created, the value decreased, and I began to research a solution to this problem. I had to leave for a few hours, so I saved my game and turned off my PS3. When I returned, to my surprise, I found that my banish enchanted iron daggers value had raised a little over 1k each. I then quickly rushed to inform the internets of the good news. Enchanters everywhere rejoice for no longer will we have to suffer the injustice of Skyrim merchants and faulty arcane enchants. No, now we demand full price for our hoards of banishing iron daggers.

All you need to do is save quit then reload your game and it should fix the prices of enchanted items (Ps3 v1.02)

Maybe it has something to do with max charges? I don't know if charge amount is set by the enchantment or by the soul gem used in the enchantment, but I'm fairly sure it's affected by your level- and the lower the charge on the item compared to it's max charges, the less it's worth.

We should test this with armors to rule this out.

Different enchantments have different monetary values. Try Banish, Paralyze, soul trap and ravage mana - they're some of the most valuable.

Things that affect the value of an enchanted item:

• The item type eg. Iron Dagger
• The item quality eg. Superior
• The enchantment type eg. paralyze
• The quality of the enchantment, this is effected by the soul used and your enchanting ability and perks and the number of charges (more powerful/fewer is better than less powerful/more).

There's a bug with items enchanted with a high-level enchanting skill. Once your enchanting level is over a certain threshold, the value of the items you make goes down. As far as I can tell, this is unintentional and there is currently no work around.

Ok I think I figured it out. I was having the same issue. My daggers were going down in value and I was trying to think about what changed.

I had checked all my enchants before to see which was most valuable, for me it was "Absorb Health". A couple days later that enchant was worth half its previous amount. So I checked the prices of the other enchants, it turns out a new enchant I added "Banish" was now by far the most valuable and it exceeded the original value of "Absorb Health".

So my conclusion is that the value of enchants is based on the BEST enchant you currently know. When my new best enchant was learned, the previous best was not worth as much.

The following statement is pure speculation with no evidence or sources to back it up. it is however an educated guess and opinion. :

I believe this to be a programming error. For something like this to happen a minus sign would have had to be switched around somewhere in the code. I believe the designer originally intended the value of player enchanted items to increase along with the player's enchant skill as that would make the most sense and incur the least amount of whining from the players. while i cant back this up with evidence i can say that i have done code before and in a code as complex and mathematically inclined as skyrim it would be easy and quite commonplace to make such a mistake. I expect there to be a series of patches to cull this and the remaining glitches of the game. i dont think it will be a problem for much longer.

I'm so surprised that no one has thought of the answer yet. It is just like real life. If there is only one of some specialty item around then it will be worth a lot. If there are many duplications of the same item then they will be worth less. So if there are 100 of an item floating around Skyrim then the value isn't the same as if there are only a few.

The prices of items scale with your overall level and skill levels. Your old gear loses it's value to you and the merchants that buy it.