WOW Trader Segment #2

Welcome to wow trader where we put the arcane brilliance on your wow wallet.

Last segment I went over some general topics, this week I would like to go more into detail about how to post auctions successfully and how to use auctioneer to simplify posting auctions.

Lets start with selling items successfully on the AH. Here are a three rules for listing auctions based on what I call the walmart strategy.

1. Have up to date data.
2. Be the cheapest.
3. Less time is better then more.

These rules cater to the AH trader. It focuses on the idea of being the walmart seller versus the nordstroms. The goal is to get your items to sell every time we list them for slightly less profit, then having to list multiple times for a sale that yield a larger profit. In other words we sell 5 items for 50 gold profit rather then one of the same item for 100 gold profit.

Again those three rules are:

1. Have up to date data.
2. Be the cheapest.
3. Less time is better then more.

Now lets dive into these very vague rules and explain in more detail what each means and doesn’t mean. 

Rule one have up to date data, this means doing a scan before listing any auctions. 

*Pro-tip: Auctioneer’s wrath version will feature a button to grab data from blizzards server faster, but the current release of Auctioneer doesn’t yet have this button. You can however use /aadv getall to get all the auction house data in a quarter of the normal scanning time.

/aadv getall

The reason we need up to date data, is that we want to list our auctions cheaper than anyone else’s however, if we don’t have up to date data we may be listing our items for more than a competitor’s price and not even know it.

* Pro-tip two: Auctioneer’s Appraiser module has a refresh button to update data of a specific item should you not want to scan the entire auction house to sell one item.

Onward to rule two, be the cheapest. When I say be cheapest I mean be exactly 1 copper less than the cheapest current lister. We want to be first on the list of items that show up on the auction house when someone does a search. To be first you have to be the cheapest. To be first on the list, and first to sell, your bid and buyout must be 1 copper cheaper than anyone else.

Do not list your product more than 1 copper cheaper. Many people think that they should mark down by a couple of gold to give buyers a reason to purchase their product. This is a false assumption. Walmart does not sell products a couple dollars cheaper, they sell everything a couple of copper cheaper.

We are also marking down by one copper to avoid a market collapsing. By market collapse I am referring to when 10 people each post an item for 5g cheaper than the last lister. This creates a situation where the profit on selling this item quickly disappears and the market bottoms out.

By listing 1 copper cheaper we maintain the market price, and profit, and still sell more than our competitors. This is the AH traders way, this is the Wal-Mart way. It may not appeal to your business ethical beliefs, but it works, look at Wal-Mart.

*This brings us to Pro-tip three: Auctioneer can be set up to automatically list your items 1 copper cheaper, there is a check box on the right side of the appraiser tab for each item that is called price matching. It can be adjusted to be 1 copper or even a percentage in the configuration user interface of auctioneer.

Finally rule three, Less time is better then more.

In a Wal-Mart auction House trader strategy we want to minimize our risk and costs of doing business.

Ideally we sell an item the first time we list it. However if we don’t sell it, we lose the deposit fee. An items deposit fee is determined by a percentage of an items vendor sell price times the listing period coefficient. This means a 48 hour deposit cost 4 times the deposit of a 12 hour deposit.

We choose a shorter listing period to take less of hit when items don’t sell and to focus our sales to times of peak users being online. To achieve this I generally list for 12 hours in the morning. My items are listed during the peak user times and shortly afterward are returned to me to be relisted the following morning.

Generally speaking if your items don’t sell in the first 12 hours, they are out of sync with the new marketprice and are not going to sell over the following 36 hours. By selling in 12 hour increments, we lose less gold when they don’t sell and are able to adjust the price to the new market price on the following day.

The exception to this rule are items which you are providing to the market in large amounts at a set price that have a zero or minimal listing fee, such as enchanting mats. However this is a more advanced topic we will discuss on a future segment.

So once more the three rules for being a wow trader are:

1. Have up to date data.
2. Be the cheapest.
3. Less time is better then more.

Auctioneer settings: What should and shouldn’t be sold on the AH.

Items that cost more in materials should not be sold on the AH. What do I mean by this, lets take a epic level crafted gun for example. Recently a friend in the game crafted an epic level gun to sell on the AH, he was going to use the gold brought in by the sale to pay for his epic flight training.

So the question is, should he be selling it on the AH or not? The answer of course is yes, he has already crafted it, so he now has to sell it on the AH. But what about before he crafted it? We ask because when we craft something we destroy X amount of gold worth of material to produce a new item worth Y amount of gold. If Y is greater then X then we should craft and sell, if X is greater the y we should not.

In other words if you can sell the materials used to craft that epic gun on the AH for the same or more then the gun, then why are you going to make the gun? The point of trade skills is to take materials worth 50g and turn them into a new item worth 100g.

90% of your recipes will turn more valuable items into less valuable items. These should if at all possible never be made