Real quick note. At the suggestion of The Goblin I mucked about with the styling code of the blog to make it a tad easier on the eyes. Let me know what you think.
For those of you that are interested in flipping this entry is for you. This is a few items that I've had repeated success flipping with the general price ranges that I've worked them in. Remember though, when it comes to flipping Your Mileage May Vary form server to server. Some might not have many collectors, some might have certain items more heavily farmed than others so take this with a grain of salt. But if you want to try your hand at it make sure that you do your homework and watch the prices and see how often it gets relisted. This can act as a clue to if it's selling at all and how popular it might be. Ok now that the disclaimer is out of the way here's what I've got.
Eternal fire, eternal air
My favorite thing to do with these is buy them on the AH for 20g each and break them down into crystals to sell for 3.5g each. That makes for very nice profit margins and you can easily control this niche market by keeping prices at a certain spot. Even more so if you can use the eternals for other things such as enchants or titansteel. I've said it before and I'll say it again, watch for who generally dominates the WG battlefields as that's where the majority of these get farmed from. Prices dip when your faction controls it for a bit of time and spike up when the other side owns it. Once you get into the rhythm of it all you can make a good amount of gold from this.
Enchanting recipes
Basically anything rare and BoE can be sold to a collector for a premium. Namely demon slaying, vanilla shield enchants, TBC resist enchants, and any BoA weapon enchants. You can sometimes find these for as low as a few hundred and sell them for triple. I've sold a few crusader recipes for 700g after buying them for 200. Another pair that can fetch a pretty copper are vitality and cat's swiftness should you be lucky enough to find them. They used to be only world drops but can now be found in magistrar's terrace from TBC as BoP recipes from the last boss so they may take a while to sell. But since not everybody knows this and obviously so many people CBA to see who sells a calico cat and pays 200g for it, yeah. The opportunity is definitely there.
Things of crafting things
By that I refer to orbs and primos. These things fluctuate a ton on my server. One day they're down to 100g the next they're at 250 and selling. You can usually find good luck with frozen right when dailys reset in the small hours of the morning, but the rest you just have to keep an eye out for. My max buying price for crusaders is 150 for making toc epics, but if I can pick them up in the 110ish range I'll flip a couple when the prices jump back up for sure. The same goes for runed orbs, but not so much due to the lack of demand. It seems that a lot of people have either forgotten about the uld epics or just don't care enough because they're "only" i226 gear. Either way, they're worth looking into.
Snowfall inks
Only try to flip these if you can afford to wait a while. Once the darkmoon faire rolls around the card makers come out of the wood work and buy up every bit of these and eternal life. So after the faire ends their price will drop rapidly from the scribes trying to move them and you can gobble them up for as low as 5g each and resell the next time the faire comes around for as high as 15 even. Again, only get into flipping these if you can afford to wait, both literally and figuratively.
Epic gems
Yes you can work the epic gem market without having your own JC to run. With as many that are coming in and out of the market the prices on some gems can yo-yo pretty quick. You can watch them go down to the cost of a raw gem at 100g and then two nights later (after raids end of course) pop right back up to 185 a piece. By knowing your server and what the more popular gems are you can easily make your way into the epic gem market without ever cutting a single gem.
Enchanted Scrolls
Along the same lines of flipping epic gems. If you have a clear grasp of the market you can easily flip a few of the more popular scrolls. Ones like blade ward, powerful stats, 15 agility, ice walker, etc. The main thing to keep track of here though, is the ebb and flow of the material supplies and not the scrolls themselves. This is because the supply of gems is going to stay high for a while due to the WG quests and daily heroics. But enchanting mats are ONLY from DE'd items and nothing else and therefore cannot be "tracked" in the traditional sense.
Since the big sellers of scrolsl have likely been in the market for some time now, you can't keep a huge stokpile of NR mats very easily, especially at the general rate that they sell relative to the supply of materials. So what you can do is to see what the average price of materials are and wait for scroll goblins to undercut each other close to their cost and buy them up. Then you'll want to repost right as raids end and make a few quick sells all ninja like. Since you don't have a supply or stokpile of your own, you'll be using the items of the goblins and their own MO against them but you can't keep it up forever. Hence the need to get in and out as quickly as you can.
None of this is particularly great for long term income, but flipping never is. What it is good for is a challenge, excitement, and a quick boost to your weekly profits. It's risky mostly when you don't have enough financial backing to take a loss, but is still good fun. As always, YMMV so tread carefully!
Thanks for stopping by!
New format is definitely easier to read. Keep up the good work!
ReplyDeleteGood post Stokpile.
ReplyDeleteAbout the new layout, I liked it better with the "Gold Cap" "The sell list" "Archive" on the side instead of after the posts.
From time to time I flip epic gems as well. Fun stuff. :) If you can afford to wait and stockpile iceblade arrows those can be flipped as well for around 100% profit. I buy them out when around 4G a stack then wait until there are none posted and then post my stacks 8 - 12 G each. I have flipped close to a million arrows like that and made over 7K profit so far.
I really should try breaking eternals into crystals too.
*On a side note I went all out on the stokpiling this weekend spent over 9K - 10K in matts. A new record for me. :)
Taking Notes,
Mulegirl
Love that darkmoon fair. What I do is purchase up nobles decks a couple weeks before the fair (they are more expensive leading up to and during the fair). Then I turn them into Darkmoon card: greatness trinkets, wait a couple weeks, and sell them for 9-10 k on the auction house.
ReplyDeleteThe trick is to wait to sell the trinkets. During the fair the AH has a lot of them and they sell for 5-6 k, but if you wait a couple weeks they are more scarce and the prices skyrocket as fresh level 80's look for good trinkets to start raiding, etc.
If you play your cards right (get it?) you can make 10's of thousands of gold a month this way.
I flip recipes from time to time if I can buy them right. If I bought it cheap enough and don't have it, I learn it. If I already own it (anything Ulduar comes to mind), I'll buy it and slap 20% on it (50% for Ulduar and I save them for non-Ulduar boss weeks) and re-list it for a quick profit. They typically will sell within an hour or two because people are always trying to finish out their BS, Tailoring, or LWing. Ulduar is hardly run anymore on my server (except for weeklies), so completionists part with thousands to acquire them now.
ReplyDeleteFlipping has always been a finder's fee business model, even in the real world. Like real estate, people buy from distressed sellers needing quick cash and turn a quick profit. Your job is to take advantage of this. In WoW, people are either trying to clear their inventory or are desperate for quick gold and the vast majority are poor (sub 5k wealth). Watch trade religiously when in capital cities, you have the chance to negotiate and get real deals. Learn the art of doing it though, there are lots of seller tricks, too.
If you are lucky you can stockpile on your server, then I hate you! LOL Like we discussed last week, when one market is dry, change to another.
Long time follower and I'm really impressed of your work so far on this blog: keep it up! :D
ReplyDeleteI preferred the previous layout since I could easily navigate through various posts from different months and see it all "right there" but that's just my opinion.
I have a quick question/wonder if you'd be able to help me out or someone that is. I started with 3k a month ago and slowly but surely I've went to 20k. That's because I've been following your advice and been stockpiling like crazy when mats are low. I've been expanding to every market I can and been making lots of profits. That's mostly thanks to your advices :D
Namely my question is this: I've been noticing lately that I'm spending waaaay too much on mats and stockpile. In one day I went from 18k to 7k because I bought everything I could since it was dirt cheap. So how much is enough...? Is there a limit? Am I overkilling with stockpiling and affecting my profits that way? I'm just hesitant some times but when I see a stack or two of epic uncut gems going for 75g each on AH I can't resist myself >_<.
Oh well, sorry for my ranting. Keep up the good work and I'll be following you :D
I found converting eternal to crystallized to be more work than it's worth, I could only sell a couple eternals worth per day, for maybe 10-20g total profit.
ReplyDeleteThe best flipping came from enchant mats in TBC. There was no craft market until we got scrolls. Now scroll making blows away flipping mats.
I cleared around 4000 this week from BoA scrolls alone on my lvl 57 enchanter (still need bracer - healing, chest - greater stats, weapon - spellpower and weapon - mighty int, only just got +15 str to weapon).
The flipping I do now, is basically on my industry items (spellthread, leg armor, BoA scrolls, buckles). If the price drops below where I'm really happy to make tons and sell them (either because it's too small a margin or because mats are scarce), even if it's well above the mat cost, I buy them out and reset it. Generally I sell enough while the price is coming down even if it goes back eventually, to make out. If I guess wrong and there's a goblin out there with an off-ah mat source and low profit threshold, then I lose a little, but not much as I usually can sell for a profit if I'm patient, I just lose that market until said goblin lets up. But I become competition with his own mats as I'm selling out, and often before I get all the way done, I notice that they are selling higher and the profit margin is getting better (I.e. I drove the competition out while I was in "get out of the market" mode).
What is this with "lucky enough to stockpile"? it's not about luck, once you have a guild bank and 10k gold or so, you can (and should) stockpile. And getting those things isn't about luck.
How are y'all viewing the blog? I still see links/post history to the right of the content, with the content window being roughly double the previous width.
ReplyDelete@ The gnome
ReplyDeleteIt may differ from server to server, but on mine (horde and alliance both) I've had a hell of a time maintaining any form of a proper stokpile of NR enchanting mats. The supply is very limited and the demand is constant, that's what I mean by lucky enough to have a large stokpile of them.
@ Anon
How much of a stokpile is too much? That's not something I can answer for you as I don't know your server, the amount of demand and the supply trends. If you could be a bit specific on what you're buying up would help a bit more. It also depends on how much of the market is using them and how much of that you sell.
I can say this though. Raw materials such as leather and saronite or dust, there is no such thing as too much I've learned. Things like titansteel, orbs, or other things that are used a lot but in small markets I only ever buy as much as I need with enough to last me a week based on the general speed of sales. I try to keep 3 stacks of frozen/crusaders and 3 stacks of titansteel with a full supply of what I craft with them.
If you're not used to selling a lot, don't buy a lot. If you're working in things that sell fast, then the sky (or bank tab) is the limit.
There are a few ways that stockpiling can hurt you:
ReplyDelete1. the price you are seeing is not a "great" price but "the new" price, or worse, on the way to a "new" price that is even lower. something changed in the supply or demand that you didn't see, so you just spent more than if you had simply waited for the new equilibrium.
2. Something major changes (expansion say) and suddenly the thing you used that mat for is no longer worth what it used to be. often this results in a mat crash as well, so you end up stuck with them. I like to watch a market through a few cycles before I do really heavy stockpiling, by which point I start to be able to smell from prices alone that I need to go look up a change that I might have missed before I buy out the house.
3. You spent so much gold that you don't have enough working capital. You never want to go down below 1-2k once you have that much, IMO, so that you can always get ports, buy vellums, and take advantage of ridiculously good trade deals. Even going down below 5k can hurt you if a really spectacular stockpile opportunity comes up. Basically, the lower you are taking your working capital, the better a deal you should be getting, because you start to give up your ability to stokpile further. Once you have 100k or so, this becomes a non-issue, but for startups, as you've seen, a good stockpile opportunity can get you spending 5-6k, so you have to be careful early.
Basically you just have to weigh the chances of these three negatives against what you stand to gain from stockpiling. The better the deal, the more you should be taking it.
In terms of risk, think in terms of how fast things move -- how many weeks of supply are you stockpiling? So I could buy a few hundred large brilliant shards, and that's nothing --- my boa scrolls sell fast enough to go through that in a week or two. On the other hand, something like runed orbs, it could take a month to use up a couple stacks, unless you're like stokpile and have every ulduar recipe on some alt or other.
Basically every day that goes by that you don't use it, is a day that some change in your market could make stockpiling a bad deal (goblin entry, new farmers, blizz changes drop rates, recipes or adds new item that dominates one you were making, etc.), so you balance that risk against the value of securing purchase of your mats at a good price when nothing significant changes. The more weeks worth of a mat you stockpile, the greater the chance of something bad happening before you can sell it out, so the better the deal has to be.
On some things, I find that I'm limited by mat supply rather than sales (essence of air/water) so I basically buy everything I see that can be used profitably. That's the crucial benefit of stockpiling -- to be able to sell stuff when nobody else has any which is where the biggest killings happen.
wow, I'm surprised about NR enchant mats, I've found it hard to make big profits on NR enchants. On my main server where I have both NR and vanilla enchants, I make a lot more profit on the vanilla, and I've rarely had trouble buying enough NR mats for good prices, it's vanilla mats that I can't seem to stock enough of. I stopped raiding in uldaur though, so I don't have a lot of the top end enchants -- maybe that's where all the money is.
ReplyDeleteJeez, all of you keep spelling my name wrong >_<
ReplyDeleteGnome, I agree to a certain extent on stocking issues, but money is never made when you sell something, it's made when you buy. Several forces are in play that you have control over - most notably information.
ReplyDeleteTherefore, my rules are to 1) Know upcoming patch information 2) Deal only in markets with unlimited demand 3) If something is at my buying price, buy it all up without question based on #1 and #2.
Sudden surges in supply are to be met with extreme purchasing. If there's a farming consortium that starts selling on my server (right now it's a skinning cartel selling at extremely low prices) I'll waste no time trying to contact them in game to buy everything they have and I'll worry about bag space later. I assure anyone, unless it's an expansion coming out, raw materials should be stockpiled always.