Yes, contrary to popular goblin belief it is possible to sell high AND fast. Some markets you can't do this in and others you can gouge as much as your want and they will sell regardless of the price. Why? Because majority of the people are lazy and want the item now. They are going to the AH to get that item instantly. If they didn't mind waiting they would go out and farm it for "free".
Some Examples:
Eternal air was selling on my server for 3-5g. I spent about 500g and cleared out the eternal air prices and reset them to 15g each. Of course I got undercut and the price settled to about 10g. Which was my original goal price and still three weeks later eternal air prices are sitting at 12g each.
Fires were selling for 8-10g in bulk and I bought out everything up to 15g and started selling singles for 17g while stacks were still sitting at 15g. In 2 days I made about 2k profit from this little stunt and prices are still at the 15-20g mark.
I had hundreds of shadow that I paid no more then 4g for. After a market reset they haven't dropped below 5g each and I can sell stacks a day for 6-7g per eternal.
Arctic fur while I did not see this coming is selling at an incredible rate for 80g. I picked up 9 stacks awhile back for 20g per fur and was using them to make leg armors and what not. I decided to see if furs were selling at this outrageous price and to my surprise I sell over a stack a day of fur for 80g per fur. (That's 1600g a stack)
Enchanting mats are another great item although a bit harder to push up prices. But people will buy enchanting mats regardless of the price. This is 100% fact and the proof is patch days and new seasons. How quickly was enchanting mats selling at unbelievable prices then? Yea the demand was higher for them at those times but you can't deny that there is always a demand for enchanting mats.
Titansteel is another hot item that will sell at whatever price and the fact its limited to 1 per miner per day helps this. I've bought bulk titansteel for 115-120g each and flipped them for as much as 150-175g each.
Lichbloom drops below 20g a stack on my server. Yet a few weeks back I reset the market and was selling lichbloom for 60g a stack. Sure the price is back to 23g but come Tuesday I'll be back selling 5 lichbloom for 10-15g and they will sell. They always do.
You want to sell high and fast on netherweave bags? Soak up all the netherweave cloth for a few weeks and watch bag prices go up. Bags will still sell just as fast at 20g as they will at 10g and most likely your competition will be out of cloth by then.
While I am a supporter and a firm believer in crashing markets to drive off competition there are just some markets where you just don't need to. There is simply no reason what so ever to crash some market prices.
Now I'm not saying go out there and be stupid and try to manipulate every market. Some servers it simply wont work if you don't have enough liquid to eat your way through the flooders. Don't buy out 500 eternals to reset a market. Wait until there is 20-30 eternals to reset. Play smart and you won't get burned (as often).
I'm sure I'll get flamed by all the wanna be goblins out there and that's fine. They can keep flipping product like they're working at McDonalds for minimum wage. I'm sitting back and running the restaurant profiting off their cheap labor. ;)
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
I've started to think that some of the goblin advice is intentionally misleading. At the very least, it's way too rigid. Your strategy for resetting prices works on a wide array of items. Mid level herbs, enchanting mats, ore/bars, and eternals are my faves. You do need to make sure you have the gold and bank space to properly reset the market.
ReplyDeleteThere's also a significant risk for things like eternals and jems: a high vendor price. I tend to post these in small quantities and undercut frequently as the price settles. If you don't get lucky and your price keep gravitating towards 3g instead of 12g, you're faced with either resetting the market again (risky) or finding another outlet for your eternals (work intensive).
Interesting strategy I'll be sure to try it out. I have been hesitant about buying out all available stock from any one thing on my server but I have the money to do it. Time to make my money work for me instead of me for my money.
ReplyDeleteItems with a constant demand will sell regardless of their price. This is something that goblins overlook. They focus only on the next undercut, reacting solely to their competitors actions without regard to how much profit it will cost them. When prices fall on common items, it's often because the goblins have panicked each other into selling cheap, not because players suddenly stopped buying.
ReplyDeleteThere is a lot of money to be made by focusing on what the *buyers* will pay. If the buyers will pay a high price, then pushing the market up to that point will increase profits, often dramatically. Focusing on the selling price alone reduces the playing field to one: you. There are no competitors, there are only auctions that can be profitably relisted and auctions that can't. Deep undercuts from desperate goblins and farmers are simply more buying opportunities.
For a while, I was the largest seller of Eternal Belt Buckles on my server, despite not having a Blacksmith. My competitors spent weeks trying to push me out by flooding the market with below-cost Buckles...which I was dutifully buying up and relisted.
It does take some juggling to balance the forces involved - customer demand vs. farmer flooding vs. goblin undercutting vs. your rapidly-draining bank account. Not every market can be controlled, and some market slumps may leave you sitting on piles of unsold stock for weeks or months until prices recover. Unlike blind goblin undercutting, large-scale relisting requires you to actually look at the market - and the closer you look, the more patterns you will find.
yeah, this is much easier to pull off with enchant mats and other things with zero or very low deposits relative to their price. Eternals and Titanium/titansteel are a lot riskier.
ReplyDeleteBut this is my primary moneymaker in various markets. Unlike the inscription and disencrafting stuff, it's *all* ah work which means that there is none of the really complicated and timeconsuming work (milling/crafting/disenchanting).
I'll de farm when greens or some component is persistently low price, or I can get a deal on something that I just don't want to sell all of (like the 50 stacks of saronite bars the other night -- those became dream shards via saronite dirks rather than being sold for 130-150% of vendor price a few stacks at a time (because I can't afford to have many expire or profit goes to zero).
But mostly I prefer to buy the stacks of stuff from other de farmers and then resell it for 20-30% more. And the risk is very low because I can almost always get my money back. only when some patch changes the market do I ever lose big, and sometimes I win big.
I actually successfully turned a profit on 30 stacks of infinite dust bought at 5g when my normal server price range is 3.50-5.00g. the ah was completely out early on a tuesday night near the beginning of 3.2 and I had just sold a bunch at 5.99 and then sold out of a small batch I posted at 7.49 just to see if they'd go. I was almost out of stock, and I had sold a dozen+ singles at 7.49 in a few minutes. Then somebody else noticed and started posting at 5g. I bought a few out and then pstd him, offering to take everything he had on hand if he'd not post for a while. turned out to be 30 stacks. I listed it all at 7.99g in stacks of 1 2 4 5 and 10. Sold about 1/3 of it overnight, and the rest went out the door next day at 6ish as the price stayed high. By the time it went back in the normal range where I'd be losing money, I'd already sold 80-90% of it for a big profit (almost 1000g total) with just a few keystrokes and leaving auctioneer to post for 10 minutes while I read a blog or something two times.
I think that was my favorite resell job as it was fairly risky, but still right, it totally depended on spotting the market situation. Anything other than a tuesday, it would have been a horrible move, but the de farmers who would normally undercut me in a second were all busy raiding, and didn't really start feeding the market again until thursday.