Flood and Blunder

Image courtesy of UK Jigsaw Puzzle Club

This post has been specifically written for inclusion in the November Wow Gold Blogging Carnival over at Just My Two Copper, while not specifically a gold making blog I do from time to time cover my gold making activities in posts.

As the end of Wrath nears I have focused more in-game time on learning the finer details of the art of gold making and along the way have found many resources, made some nice profits and had a lot of fun. It has generally been easy (if a little time consuming - glyph making and bag making is painfully dull and slow yay for afk crafting though) however, it hasn't been without mistakes.

The biggest blunder was to simply craft a batch of goods from the materials that I had and to flood the auction house by listing them all at once. We're not talking small batches of 2-5 here, I'm talking Wal-mart sized batches of anything upto 50, seriously looking back I feel a complete nubcaek. It was one that I had made often in the past without realising the impact of my action or how this decreased the potential profit I could make. Looking back, it is blatantly obvious, especially as I had studied economics at school, although to my defence that was 1984-85, so the old grey matter needed reminding of the old supply and demand curve.

In fact, looking back I had a lot in common with Wal-mart, I was selling hundreds of things a week at very low prices. Unfortunately this took up way too much of my time and made sure that the value of what I was selling was always at a low % profit.

Buying in bulk is good, crafting in bulk is good and selling in bulk is evil (well mostly). What I have come to learn is patience in posting my goods provides more sales at bigger profits. A limited supply item is ultimately more attractive to the buyer and therefore subject to a premium. The other way profits are increased is that fewer items (hopefully zero) are returned unsold and therefore the listing fee is not wasted.

By drip feeding items onto the market I am maximising the gold per hour by having to spend less time managing my unsold items and reposting them. However that is not the best bit, I am making more gold per day than I was before meaning my overall wealth is increasing faster.

Of course there are times that goods can and should be posted in massive amounts and a good example was the recent Glyphmas and certain items are good to post in bulk if you don't want to lose out or spend all day reposting 5 items every time the others sell (Netherweave Bags especially at weekends).

The answer is of course to learn the market, learn what sells and more importantly when it sells.