Straight to the customer

While playing the AH is great fun, somethings that are in demand sell very slowly there. Generally these are very specific niche markets such as consumables or special resistance gear that are needed for a particular dungeon. In these markets it may not be worth it to pay the AH fees to try and sell them or the effort of constantly relisting them. When you come across a situation such as this, it could help to go to a specific area to sell them. In warcraft it would be trade chat or going to a specific area where people gather that need it.

Is there a daily quest that needs you to find 8 of a certain world drop? Go to the zone with the quest NPC and sell them there. You'll usually get a very increased rate of sales that way than if you just put them on the AH. This is another tactic that is worth mentioning for guild wars. In an upcoming patch, they will be adding a sort of "staging area" for the original and are intending to do the same thing with the sequel. It's basically an outpost where people can gather for LFG instead of a chat channel that nobody is going to use.

So if there's a fire dungeon and having some resistance gear makes it a heck of a lot more practical to do, you can go to this staging area and sell your wares there instead of listing it on the AH hoping that somebody knows that it's there. This falls under the category of education that I mentioned a while ago. If you need res gear for a certain instance, you don't have to be a moron to not have it. You could be a good player that just didn't know that it was added in, that it's actually worthwhile, or that it even exists. So by simply saying that you're selling it, more people will take notice.

So they look into it and think to themselves "ya know I do have troubles with that place and this is probably why." Then they buy it and try it, they get done a lot faster and with less dying and burn marks and voila! They say to other friends that it works and they buy some more of your res gear.

So should they add in a staging area type of zone in GW 2 this would be highly recommended as there's always way to tweak out your gear and weapons to get better. In addition to that, going to mid range starter zones and selling gear that's great for that level is another alternative. And with the ease of map travel, you can easily go to several different zones to make a post or two in local chat and move on to another area as a sort of traveling salesmen. The AH isn't just a glorified vending machine for goblins, the money comes from other players and upon occasion going straight to the player and cutting out the middle man can work out quite well.

Especially if you sell in a town without an AH something that has a good demand but is severely undercut on the AH. This way you can still make some good profits and stealing a number of sales from your competition. Another example of doing this is selling flasks in WoW around raid time in trade chat instead of on the AH. You know that people are buying them around this time and are very likely to see you selling a bunch for a good price and decide to stock up. And since they don't have to go looking for them and they don't need to buy a bunch of them individually, they'll buy from you out of sheer convenience. Small tip, but still very worthwhile to be aware of. Even if you don't try this your competitors just might.


Thanks for stopping by!