Stockpile

You've read me mention the importance of stockpiling mats now and again. Today I'll give you a good example of why it's so important using some generic average sales. In your average week I'll sell loads of things and I need enough materials purchased to supply myself for the following week. If you run out of mats, you stop making gold obviously and since you never know how much of what you'll sell, a big stock is important. You also never know when a price spike will come around or a shortage of mats which will hinder your sales greatly.

In a low sales week you can sell:
35 belt buckles
10 titanium bars
10 JC leveling pieces
5 weapon chains
20 assorted epic gems
60 assorted rare gems
10 heavy armor kits
20 arctic fur
40 heavy borean
60 netherweave bags
10 frostweave bags
10 LW profession bags
9001 assorted enchant scrolls
10 sapphire/brilliant spell threads
30 enchanting rods
2,500 glyphs

Now that's a decent sized list and as I'm sure you can imagine, is a truck full of materials. It equates to something like several hundred saronite bars (or a thousand ore), hundreds of dust, dozens of abyss and cosmics, a thousand leather, a few thousand cloth, thousands of ink of the sea. Now that's a rather tall order to buy in a single day or two, but it's what a serious AH player requires on a slow week. Now if you tried to purchase all of this in a single day, you'd end up draining the entire supply and need to pay a premium for the rest. This is why you always stock up so that you never have to pay the high prices.

When you really get into the AH game, you can't be afraid of not selling or over stocking yourself because everything has a price, and somebody is going to pay it. Some things might take a week or two to sell like crafted epics or high end twink gear, but they WILL sell. One key yo success in the AH game is to know what you can buy 30 full stacks of while being confident that they'll all sell that week. Once you get this down (which comes solely from experience) you'll have a strong foothold on that market.

A while ago I spent well over 2,000 gold on saronite bars at something like 1.8g each when my normal buying price is 1.6 each. I spent a bit more because the seller had such a ridiculous amount it warranted a bit extra. As I was sending the bars to my various toons that use it and stashing the rest into half a bank tab I thought to myself "Self, you won't need any more saronite this MONTH!"

Little did I know, I was greatly mistaken and was completely out in ten days with none under 50g/stack left on the AH. Mind you, I use saronite for titanium x-mutes, buckles, chains, and rods and that's all. Just from that alone you should see how easy and how quickly your business can change. After all, it's not like I'm using sarontie for every single profession in game, so there's quite a demand for saronite based products.

Now if you're just starting up a business, obviously you can't afford to drop several grand on mats. What you should do is buy enough for your first few stacks of things and go about how I recommended in my starting up post. But if you're already in the game and looking to expand, you'll want to buy a ton of mats (after doing your research of course!) at bare bones prices so you can turn a decent profit while undercutting heavily. And once you're done with that you'll have a decent supply left over after your week of price crashing (assuming you continue to buy during this time).

To sum all this up, it takes an absurd amount of mats to handle multiple professions on the AH at once. And it's also very easy to under estimate the amount you'll be selling on any given week. Because of this you'll always want to be prepared and if you end up buying more than you sell that just means that you have less crafting to do next week. As you work a profession more and more you'll get a good feeling of how much you know you need and how much extra you want to have around. Just be ever mindful of your buying threshold.

As to how much you should stockpile of what, that's entirely up to you and what you know about your market on your server. So I can't give you any pointers on that one, but use your average sales and base it off that so you can keep at least a full week of supplies around.

Thanks for stopping by!