Sunday, May 9, 2010

The best seller



Another post on what to do about getting into a new market. Today's topic is what you should start out with.

When entering a new market, you always want to start out slow unless you're the adventurous type like myself. So today I'll be giving you a list of every market I frequently work in and what the best sellers are. The purpose of this is to give you an idea of where you should start so you can test the waters. If you have absolutely zero luck selling these items then you may not want to jump into that market head first.

Of course you could have always just ran into a few campers or stepped into the middle of several goblins battling it out on the AH that week. So make a handful of these things and give it a week to see what's what. After that time if you sold a lot, branch out a tad more. If you sold almost nothing, search through that item's AH pages and take a look at who's selling what and how much you were undercut by.

The undercut amount can potentially tell you who you're dealing with. If it's a gold or less they're camping, expect to have to work to get a foothold into that market. If it's by more than 6 gold it's a goblin, stay away from this market unless you want a real fight on your hands as you'll likely spend a lot of time and effort making little or no profit before they cave in.

You can read this post as a small update on my How To series for each of the professions as well as a glimpse into the commonly sold products. You don't need to worry about amassing a gigantic inventory of everything, just a handful of each to get yourself started. Once you get a feel for things you can start crafting a wider variety of products for sale. One last tip for you is when testing out a market, don't post a bunch of things all at once, several times a day, several days in a row.

This way you can disguise yourself as a casual seller and fly on in under the radar so to speak. That way any serious players won't pay you much notice. With any luck, only posting one or two at a time will keep you away from their attention and allow you a better idea of what is selling opposed to WHO is selling. With all that being said, here's my starting up recommendations for what to craft and how many to have stocked up.


Alchemy, transmute spec: 4 of each
Don't bother unless you have easy access to a JC as that's where most of your money will come from. Naturally get some epics transmuted, see the JC section on recommended cuts for those, but this one is focused on meta gems.

Skyflares:
Chaotic

Earthsieges:
Relentless

A few others worth noting for earthsieges are Austere and beaming. An extra few Chaotic cuts are ember and forlorn. These are occasional sales but little competition. If you come into a ton of metas make a few of those as well.


Inscription:
3 of each glyph, 20 rune scrolls, 40 armor vellum,
and 2 off-hands

Certainty the last profession you want to start small in to make big money, but we all have to start somewhere. To start you can just make 10 of every Deathknight glyph you can and you'll likely sell a bunch right away. See my post on Inscription Redux for the glyphs I sell the most often. Good thing that books of glyph mastery are a quarter of the price I paid for them when I started out... 100g O.o

For the off-hands, start out with just the Faces of Doom. It sells regularly while the iron bound tome not so often (but does still sell). The rune scrolls usually sell in bulk and the same goes for the armor vellum so it's a good idea to make a stack of two at the beginning. Those you'll want to pay attention to the stack sizes and list them in stacks of what seems the best option. If there's a ton of singles, list full stacks and vice versa. If there's a bunch of both, sell them in stacks of 5.


Smithing: 2 of each rod, 8 buckles
The best thing you can make to start out small I've mentioned a million and oen times: friggin belt buckles dammit! Really if you aren't either crafting these or getting them made, hit yourself. Hard. After buckles look into enchanting rods, namely eternium and adamantite. I haven't bothered too much with vanilla ones as they're common for leveling up BS and get flooded at material cost. But definitely make the TBC ones.


Leather working:
Heavy borean leather, lots of it. Ok that's it. Moving right along.


Gems:
There's two routes you can go here, rare and epic. Pick your poison and what suits you best based on what you're willing to invest and what sort of supply of gems you're looking at. You can also make bloodstones into strength, ap, or SP if you want to have some fun.

Rare: 3 of each
Solid (blue)
Enduring, vivid (green)
Shifting, mysterious, sovereign, puissant (purple)
Bold, runed, fractured (red)
Smooth, rigid (yellow)
Etched, luminous, potent, reckless (orange)

Epic: 2 of each
Stormy (blue)
Mysterious, purified, glowing (purple)
Bold, fractured, runed (red)
Luminous, potent (orange)
Brilliant, quick (yellow)


Enchanting: 4 of each armor enchant, 2 of each weapon enchantI'll ignore any non trainer recipes since most aren't likely to have any of those.

Chest:
10 stats
8 stats
Major health (vanilla)

Boots:
Ice walker
Greater fort

Gloves:
Exceptional SP

Cape:
Greater speed

2H weapon:
Greater savagery

1H weapon:
Greater potency
Mighty SP
Exceptional SP
Berserking

Shield:
Major stamina (tbc, vendor bought in shattrath)


Alchemy, flasks and potions:
This is just a guess as I haven't looked into this a ton, but here's the ones most commonly used by raiders.

Flasks:
Stone blood
Frost wyrm
Endless rage
Pure mojo

Potions:
Speed
Wild magic


Tailoring: 4 threads, shit load of netherweave bags, 6 specialty cloth

Threads:
This sorta depends on what price you can get eternal fire/life for. Frozen orbs have probably settled down and won't move that much, but eternals always fluxuate. Pick whichever one you can get for cheap and make a few to sell. These will either go very quick or not at all as not many tailors use their profession for gold.

Netherweave bags:
As I mentioned a few times before, these literally sell faster than you can craft them.

Specialty cloth:
This depends on what spec you are. The best seller here is spellweave and then ebonweave. Moonshroud isn't used that much I've found.


Ok I hope this helps you get a good idea of where to go with the above markets. Always start out small to get a feel for what's going on, take note of the big sellers, see what items sell differently. Don't be too concerned with making a lot of gold, just look to make a few profitable sales so you can learn the market as the big money will come later. But mostly pay attention to the difference between what I list as good things to sell and what YOU are selling. Remember different servers are different.


Thanks for stopping by!

6 comments:

  1. Another great post.
    I begin to like your blog alot more then Marcko's, wich lately just seems to focus on irl money rather then just blogging about his gold adventures.

    Keep up this extremely good work!

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  2. Consistently good advice, and I appreciate it. Keep up the good work, I check your site everyday and it has helped me a ton.

    Thanks

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  3. You use QA3, right? I've been using it mainly for enchanting scrolls and Nightmare Tears, the things that have no deposit cost so if I'm undercut I can cancel all and repost. I've been wondering if you use it to post all of your markets, and if so, which one you allow it to cancel for reposting. Certain vendor pets (like the ones from Dalaran) I definitely tell it not to cancel, since they carry such a steep deposit cost.

    This week a friend paid for me to transfer one of my characters to horde side. So now a have a hunter (engineering/enchanting) on alliance, and a paladin (enchanting/jewelcrafting) on horde. I've really been enjoying playing horde, and I have been wanting to level more alts to extend into other markets, but I am unsure where to dive in next. I've considered going with a death knight next, since they start out much higher and there would be less I would have to do to get into two new markets. At this point, I am thinking blacksmithing and alchemy might be the best ones to try out next. I'll also probably need to create a guild bank just to be able to stokpile (u c wat I did thar) mats for my professions. Eventually, I would like to be able to work with all the crafting professions, and with the same faction.

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  4. @ Charlie
    I SEE WUT YOU DID THAR!

    I do use QA3 to do all of my posting, but I don't use it for the expensive vendor pets. Things with a high deposit cost that have high competition as well I'll still auto cancel with it just for the sake of holding my place in the market and/or forcing others out.

    As for another pair of professions, smithing is definitely a good choice as the rods buckles, and epics sell very often. The other I might suggest would be tailoring as the inventory space you need for it is very small compared to the rest and is just as profitable (and easy to work) as smithing is.

    I'm glad you're enjoying the horde as I'm enjoying the alliance. It is sooo much easier the level with them than the horde. I wish you much luck in your future endeavors!

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  5. So how much do you usually sell the vendor pets for? The ones from Dalaran I tend to sell anywhere from 80-100g each. Recently, I even sold an Obsidian Hatchling for over 500g! xD

    Since I've figured out that the AH cut is 5%, I've been setting my thresholds to be mats + 8% to give me some room for profit.

    I guess it does make sense then to set up auto cancel for things even with a higher deposit cost, to deter those with less stones in their jockstraps to do the same.

    I never really thought of tailoring on the death knight, though I do know at least one friend of mine that has that combination, or did for a while. Though, I'm not too concerned about my professions matching up with the class, since right now I'm wanting to invest into another alt and professions with the least required out of my time and gold. Tailoring sounds like a good idea! Thanks a bunch, and good luck with your alliance experience!

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  6. Hi Stokpile,

    Just thought I'd let you know that I've been following your blog for quite some time and wanted to give you a MASSIVE congratulations on 7 digits, it's quite a feat.

    For the last 2 months I've steadily taken hold of the glyph market on 2 seperate servers (recently transferred to play with friends). I've had some great success with it and enjoy collecting 2-3k a day from it! :)

    I recently started levelling up a DK and chose JC/BS as professions on my new server. I've found the camping to be extreme in the jc market specifically with rare gems as the profitability of epics is so minimal it seems hardly worth it. I already have a farmer on the server who sends me all his ore at 10g/stack so who am I to complain. Even smelting it, at the 100 stacks a day he sends me, its a free 250g.

    I'm just finishing my BS on my DK and will heed your advice on the smithing market with rods and buckles and will certainly be glad to let you know how I progress in taking over my newest market!

    Thanks again, and keep up the great work!

    Odysyus-Terrokar(H)

    ReplyDelete