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Originally Posted by IWEARGOGGLES
Anyone have some brief tips on how to beat the AH? I've been turning over some strange dust and stuff but I think I made too many and so I can't get a great turnaround on them.
I have like 10 stacks of 20 now and there are only like 5 listed on my realm.
It is a really new realm. Thanks!
Also, wtf good is Auctioneer? I only use it to see how much stuff sells to vendor for.
If you want to get into trading on the AH, you'll need auctioneer for sure. Basically, it's a mod that keeps a database of price data (provided you scan the AH regularly). Also, use wow.allakhazam.com and
www.wowecon.com as extra tools to figure out prices for items. Why is this stuff necessary? Well, here's why. You find item X and you want to sell it. WTF do you price it at? Yeah, you can "PC item X" in chat, but a lot of people will give you ******ed prices.
Now, when using those tools, use a little intelligence. Many items are not heavily traded, and with such a small sample size, the prices won't be super accurate. Also, prices vary from server to server. I found that generally items sold for ~3/4 of the Allahkazam listed median price because the general population just happened to be cheaper. Also, don't just run a scan with Auctioneer and be like "Wow! This item is 60% of the median price!" and buy it right away. Look at the sample size, check Allahkazam, think if people actually use it. Like someone said above, some people post bogus prices to **** with people's auctioneers.
When deciding what items to trade, make sure you have a feel for their "tradability" as I like to call it. I guess another word for this would be trade volume. Some items, like ores/dusts/other mats trade very fast. Some, like epics (well, most epics) have very low tradability. There's a tradeoff in the sense that the higher tradability a particular item has, the easier it is to trade but the more efficiently that market will be priced. It's easier to find inefficiencies in low volume markets, but it may take a week's worth of "WTS xxx" in the trade channel to unload it.
Trading can be a lot of fun, but at times it's really time-consuming. We're poker players, so use your poker background to estimate the potential gold/time. Don't fall into the stupid mentality that any 2g profit on a trade is a "free" 2g. A lot of young WoW kids think this way. If I buy an item for 10g and I have to WTS in trade chat for 3 hours to get 12g, forget it. If I can buy a stack of dusts for 10g that I know will immediately sell on AH for 12g, meaning the time invested is extremely little, then hell yeah, I'll take it. Generally, if you feel that you're going to have to sell an item in trade chat, it should be making you more profit since you're investing way more time.
Here are some tips on pricing in AH. When people want something, they want it now. This means if there's an item for 10g/10g bid/BO as well as another listing for 8g/12g, which one do you think will sell first? So always try to be marginally undercutting the competition. This could be as ridiculous as listing an item for 9g99s when all of the others are 10g. I generally favor higher turnover to higher profit. Meaning if the lowest price for item X is 20g right now, I'd prefer to price at 19g and get my gold faster than price at 22g, even if I know it will eventually sell. This is assuming I'm still making a decent profit at both prices of course. When I was playing, the items were ordered by buyout price, so it was important to make sure my buyout was the lowest. Now, I believe they're ordered by bids, so you need to look at both numbers. For example, if the cheapest in the list for item Y is 10g/20g, then you should do 9g99s/20g. Being listed first matters a lot. There have even been times where someone listed theirs as 9g99s/9g99s, but I just do 9g/10g and mine get bought first.
Lastly, apply your poker bankroll management to trading. Even though this is pretty obvious and probably not that important, I'll mention it. If you have 100g, don't buy 50g items. OTOH, if you have 500g, then 50g items are probably fine. First, you won't be able to trade until that item is sold, and second, you might have to sell it at a loss. Not every item you buy will make a profit. Sometimes you'll realize that an item is worth less than you originally thought, or you'll find you would prefer to have the gold back rather than spend more time in trade chat, so you unload it at a loss. Unfortunately, at some point trading probably won't be worth your time anymore since the potential earn from trading gets capped out pretty early. When I didn't have that much gold, I was happy whenever I made 50g profit or even 10g. After I worked my roll into the thousands, there just aren't any items flying around that cost 500g and give 100g profit.
This (below) is something I posted in another WoW AH thread before. Maybe you'll find some use out of it.
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Here's what I've learned in my short time trading on the AH. Just a warning, I've only been doing this for the last week or two, but I've probably spent as much time trading as I did grinding. Also, I'm including trading in the trade channel along with trading on the AH. It's all the same to me.
First of all, get the add-on Auctioneer. Learn how to use it. Also, you can use Allakhazam.com and look up median AH prices on that site. Between those two tools, you should be able to get a good feel for what an item is worth. Auctioneer has a built in tool to scan for auctions below the market value. Of course, you don't want to just scan and then buy every item on the list. You need to eyeball the options and make good picks.
I try to pay attention to the trade volume of different items. This will determine how easily you are able to unload items after you buy them. It's just not worth it if you pick up an item for 1g but it takes you a week of "WTS xyz item" to unload it for 5g. I will categorize things below.
Green weapons/armor (tradability: low)
I personally think these are terrible. (These can be good to disenchant if you can get them low, but I'm just talking about straight trading here.) If you post them on the AH, it's so unlikely that someone is going to be looking for your specific item, so that basically means you have to sell it in the trade channel. I personally think this is a huge pain and I don't deal with these. Tried a few times, got stuck with [censored] items.
Blue weapons/armor (tradability: medium)
These are a little better, but you need to have some idea of which ones are good/bad. As an example, casters use cloth, so stats like intellect, and to a lesser degree spirit and stamina, are useful. I haven't played any of the fighting classes so I don't have that great idea of what amount of which stats are good. In general, I try to avoid these unless I can get an amazing deal, like < 25% market price, or if I know it's a high demand blue.
Purple weapons/armor (tradability: high)
These are the easiest to trade out of these 3. People want epics, and it's so much more likely that someone will do a scan of the AH for new purple gear, than blue, and moreso for blue than green.
Green recipes/books (tradability: low)
Don't bother.
Blue recipes/books (tradability: medium)
Some of the recipes are really high in demand (ie. fiery enchant, mongoose). I find that recipes < blue are not worthwhile, and even a lot of the blues are crap. The prices for the books (to teach spells) seem to fluctuate a lot and I've found that sometimes I can pick up something like Book: Gift of the Wild for 1g. But then it ends up taking me awhile to unload it, because 24h in the AH isn't always long enough, even if I'm listing it at 75% market price.
Purple recipes (tradability: low)
I've had a couple experiences with buying epic recipes for 500g that were supposedly worth 600-700g. My theory is that these are pretty rare, so if someone wants what you're selling, it's not going to matter to a rich 70 if it's 600g or 650g. You might not want to jump into these right away, as you'll find you can be stuck with them sometime. And it's hard to get a good estimate on the price. If you make one bad buy on a recipe that Allakhazam lists as 600g but it turns out you're server values it at 400g, you could be out a good amount of gold in the process, wiping all of your small 5-10g trades.
Goods used in crafting (tradability: high)
These include ore, cloth, dusts, essences, etc. In general, I'm not searching these for deals too much. It should be obvious that items with higher trade volume also tend to be more efficiently priced. I think if you get into this stuff, you'll find yourself nickel and diming for 1-2g at a time.
Cards (tradability: varies)
If you're going to buy/sell the cards (you know, the furies, blessings, warlords, etc cards), make sure you know which ones are good. I picked up the 2/3/4 of warlords (3 of each) at ~1g each, and I found myself having trouble unloading them for even a low price. On the other hand, the blessings cards are really in demand. I think these can be worthwhile if you're smart about it.
There are other items too, but I'm getting too lazy to list them all out. Basically, I look at the tradability of items. The higher it is, the lower profit margin I need to make it worth my time. If I see someone selling a stack of arcane dust for 12g, and I know I can immediately turn around and sell it on AH for 15g and it will be bought, then sure, I'll do it. On the other hand, if I can buy a lower traded item for 12g and eventually sell it for 15g after WTSing in the trade channel everyday for a week, forget it. You should look at your profit margins in nominal values rather than relative values. Making 50g on 200g purchase is obviously better than making 2g on a 2s purchase.
Items that you know people will search for, like dusts, ores, etc. Basically the high volume items. It's better to list these in AH. Much simpler on your part and you can dedicate your time elsewhere. Items with low trade volume should be sold in the trade channel.
Also, understand the idea of undercutting. Sorry, it's just a stupid joke I'll make because the kids who play WoW are sometimes way too young and stupid to understand the idea of basic supply and demand. I see people do this all the time: "Undercutting prices blah blah blah" and then I go take a look and I see 10 singles of item xyz for 10g and that guy's 5x stack for 60g. I was initially skeptical that an MMO which has been around for awhile would have such an inefficient market, but I was proven wrong very quickly after spending some time in the AH. In general, if I buy an item for 10g and I can sell it immediately for 17g or spend some time and squeeze 20g out of it, I will take the first option. You only have so much time/chat resources to spread among trading your different items, that instead of focusing on an extra 3g for this one, you could be focusing on acquiring a new item for 7g.
I'll post more if I think of anything, but I'm hoping that someone else will contribute their little tips/tricks that they've picked up during their playtime.
Last edited by Dazarath; 04-02-2008 at 08:18 AM.