Auction House Nirvana: Part 3

NOTE: For those of you wondering about the glyph market like I am, I found an -amazing- article on it that helps you out with buying prices, inks, etc in a very simple format. check it out here. Though take the blackfallow ink trade in part with a grain of salt.



Part 3: The Application
In case I've lost some of you already here's a short recap:

- You want to be priced high enough that you get the most profit
- Priced low enough that people won't think too long about buying
- Low enough that it won't attract too much attention
- Listed in the buyers "expected" price range


A lot of this is based on the mentality of your customers and a lot is based on the potential goblins lurking around. You don't want the goblins to notice the large profit margins and you can try to hide this by cleaning the AH of all the materials regularly. What this will do is cause people that are farming them to list them at a very high price since they think that nobody is selling them.

An example of this is netherweave and frostweave. One day there will be two pages of it dirt cheap and the next day there's 3 stacks at 100g (yes I'm aware that almost everyone knows that these bags are a great market). Now by buying up all of the cheap netherweave every chance you get accomplishes several things.

First you raise the price as the demand is there but after you bought everything the supply is not so the prices go up. This will attract attention of people questing in outlands and the farmers. They'll start listing things that lowers the price, thus giving you more of a stokpile.

Secondly, anybody that's thinking of getting into that market will see the high priced materials more often than not and think that it's not profitable to get into. That removes the bulk of potential competitors. Even your average goblin will fall for this if they're not doing their homework live I've said to do many a time.

And lastly, anybody that wants to buy the bags will have to go through you and you get to set the toll. This is because as far as they know the current high prices won't go down for a while if at all and they need their bags now.

Those are the things you need to keep balance with. Don't drive away too many people, don't raise prices too much, let them fall so you can stokpile all the cheap materials to craft your widgets and repeat the cycle. Once you manage to get this rhythm down in your market of choice you'll have learned the hardest part of the AH game. This is when you can truly say that you've mastered your markets. Finding that happy medium where you have just enough interest in people farming and not too much to draw serious competition in selling is the way you can guarantee yourself a future of wealth in wow.

I hope I explained what this so called "middle ground" theory is all about in a way that you all can understand. It took a decent amount of thought to really spell it all out so some smaller pieces might have gotten lost in the shuffle. Take what you've learned and see if you're at a point where you can apply it. Good luck and as always...


Thanks for stopping by!