Time Is Money: Selling in multiple stack sizes on the auction house
by Basil Berntsen 
Feb 19th 2010 at 5:00PM
Time Is Money is where the WoW.com editors told Basil to put all his nonsense instead of clogging up their inboxes with thoughts and tips about gold making in World of Warcraft.
Hi folks! Today we'll be talking about something that many experienced auctioneers have discovered on their own-- the stack size you list on the auction house has an effect on your profits and sales volumes. There are many types of things that you'll find yourself selling as you get more involved in making gold on the AH, and most of them are being bought by people who need more than one, but less than a stack.
The buyers for whatever product you're marketing are motivated mostly by price, however also by convenience. If a buyer needs a stack of 3, say, Infinite Dusts, unless you provide them with the choice of buying a stack of three, they need to choose between 3 singles or a stack that would leave them with leftovers. If the prices are the same, they'll typically go for avoiding leftovers. Many will even pay more for singles to they can avoid leftovers. You also have to factor in that many of them use the default AH interface, complete with its horrible sorting, so they may just buy the singles to avoid having to page through to the stack size they want.
How should you use this to make more gold? You can provide the service of pre-packaging your wares in a variety of stack sizes. The skill comes in when you're trying to decide what sizes to offer, how much of each size you should list, and what prices you should use. Here are some rules of thumb:
- See if any of the common uses for the product lend itself to a particular stack size. Adamantite Powder, for example, is used by jewelcrafters trying to level their skill in stacks of 4 for Mercurial Adamantite, so you can count on seeing more demand for this particular stack size
- Test the waters by posting all sorts of stack sizes and seeing what sells fastest.
- Try to price each stack size based on other auctions for the same stack size- even if some guy has a 20 stack of Wild Magic Potions up for sale at 10% under your cost, you will still make sales if you undercut the lowest price for singles with singles and 5 stacks with 5 stacks.
- When you list weird stack sizes (generally anything that's not 1, 5, 10, 20, or a number based on a common use), you might want to try increasing your unit price if you have no competition. People buy my infinite dusts at a 30% premium to avoid having leftovers. I don't sell all that many per week, but I still have no competition most nights.
Being an auctioneer is like being able to print money. Or gold, as it were. Wait, that doesn't make sense... you can print on gold, but you can't print gold. That would be closer to transmutation? I can transmute titanium, but that's only worth it if the price of saronite is low enough to justify the time spent making it. I need some sort of analogy here. Whatever, I'll figure it out later. Making gold? periodically, Time Is Money will give you short tips on how to make money.
Filed under: Time Is Money
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Cyanea Feb 19th 2010 5:03PM
I HATTTEEE scrolling through thirty pages of a single Infinite Dust trying to find a full stack, especially now that everyone and their brother is rolling in Dust thanks to the LFG tool.
zcubed Feb 19th 2010 5:07PM
Auctionator could be your new friend, check it out on curse.com
Zalvi24 Feb 19th 2010 5:10PM
this may come asasurprise to some players but if you looking for infinite dust in the AH just click on the rarity tab and it will show you the auctions with stacks of 20 and with less
perdue96 Feb 19th 2010 5:23PM
To think that people believe that they will actually have "left-overs" is crazy. You WILL use all of a stack of 20 infinite dust eventually. Maybe not today but when some of the high enchants require 40 infinite dust it is a pain in the finger to click select-buyout-confirm-select-buyout-confirm over and over and over and over. BAH!
Thundrcrackr Feb 19th 2010 6:16PM
I agree with Cyanea.
Infinite dust is the WORST example of something you should sell in singles, because there are already hundreds of listings for them.
I will purposely skip over the auctions from the D-bag who lists 10 or 20+ singles to buy the next guy's, even if they cost a little bit more or leave me with extras. I can easily relist the extras in a matter of seconds. The mailbox is 5 feet from the auctioneer in SW now.
If you only have a few of them, then by all means, list them as singles. But don't be THAT GUY and list 10+ singles. That's just downright annoying.
Sleutel Feb 19th 2010 7:06PM
I hate the single-dust posters so much that I will purposely NOT buy them, even if they're really cheap, just to spite the asshole who posted them as singles instead of more useful stack sizes.
Same applies to anyone else posting things that stack to 20 or higher as mass postings of single items.
Fenrix Feb 20th 2010 1:05PM
I hate pages of items listed singly as well. However, most buyers are lazy and singles sell in one listing while bigs stacks don't. Sadly, it's there because it works. And until Blizzard changes the way to view prices easily, it's there to stay.
Rob Feb 19th 2010 5:10PM
Alot of people use Auctionator (i think that's the name, NOT auctioneer). It allows buying and selling of multiple stacks at the same price. Given that, i will sometimes post 10 or 20 stacks of something for the very simple reason that I can get rid of a bunch of garbage using QA2 and not have to post every single thing. Auctioneer does the same thing but not as quickly.
Anyway my advice is to get auctionator which is a huge time server for buying raw materials (it will even save you from sorting through 30 pages of singles).
But yeah the value of the right stack can't be underesimated. For some of my bread and butter items I didnt sell ANY until I figured out the right stack size, now I sell some every posting.
Abbadon Feb 19th 2010 5:37PM
I sort auctions using Auctioneer's percent column although I think this was meant to be used with frequent AH scans... I don't scan the AH at all any more, but this column will still sort your search and put the lowest price per unit (regardless of stack size) up at the top.
And in some cases, you can charge a bit more for larger stack sizes as some buyers will gladly pay a premium to only have to make a single purchase vs 20 individual purchases. Saves them a bit of time, and we all know that Time is Money!
Lolone Feb 19th 2010 5:39PM
From new PTR Patch Notes:
Entire stacks of a specific item type can be placed in the Auction frame and several options have been added for choosing how to list auctions.
Stack Size: If a stack of items has been added to the Auction frame, players can select the size of the stack they wish to sell. If an invalid stack size is entered (i.e. a stack of 21 Saronite Ore), the Create Auction button will be grayed out.
Number of Stacks: In addition to selecting the size of a stack, players can select how many stacks of an item they wish to sell (i.e. if a player has a total of 43 Saronite Ore in the Auction frame, they can choose to list 2 stacks of 20, 4 stacks of 10, 8 stacks of 5, 43 stacks of 1, etc. If the number and amount of stacks listed results in a remainder, the left-over items will be placed back in the player's bags automatically).
Stack Size and Number of Stacks are linked mathematically so that altering the variables of one may automatically calculate the amount of the other (i.e. if a player puts 20 in the Stack Size field and 43 Saronite Ore are in the Auction frame, the Number of Stacks field will change to 2 by default. If a player only wishes to sell one stack of 20 Saronite Ore, the Number of Stacks field can be manually changed to 1).
Price: Players can now choose to input the price of an item Per Stack or Per Item by selecting either option from a pull-down. If Per Item is selected and a player is selling a stack of that item, the Auction House will multiply the selected Per Item price by the amount of that item in the stack. If Per Stack is selected, the player can enter the total price he or she wishes to charge for each stack of that item being listed.
Auction Post Completion Bar: If multiple items or stacks of items are being listed at once by a player, a Posting completion bar will appear showing the total progress of each individual auction being listed once the Create Auction button is selected. The greater the number of individual listings being made in a single press of the Create Auction button, the longer this process will take. Players can still browse the Auction House while the Posting completion bar is in progress, but moving around will interrupt the progress, similar to moving while attempting to create multiple bandages with First Aid. Just as with creating bandages, auctions that were completed prior to the character moving or otherwise canceling the actions will successfully be listed.
Basil Berntsen Feb 19th 2010 6:16PM
I wrote this before the patch notes were released- unfortunately it was scheduled to go public just about the same time :P
Don't worry, there's a patch review in the works!
Nizari Feb 19th 2010 6:09PM
It also depends a lot on who's buying these materials. Enchanting mats are typically bought by one of two kinds of people: those who just need to get a particular enchant, and those who are powerleveling enchanting (or possibly tailoring). So something like dust sells well either at the extremes; an entire stack, or as individual item.
Herbs, on the other hand, are used by just about every one at a steady clip (several flasks per raid, one mana or health pot per boss fight) so there's no reason to sell them in smaller amounts. Particularly, the herbs needed for the flasks, mana, and health pots can be sold by the whole stack.
Abbadon Feb 19th 2010 6:20PM
Is there a way (in-game or addon) to find uncut gems?
I hate that I type in "cardinal ruby" and get back every cut along with the uncut gems. Then if I sort by name, all the uncut rubies get grouped together (and for some gems, this means scrolling to the 2nd or 3rd page to find them alphabetically) but their prices are all jumbled. So after sorting by name, the one with the lowest price is buried in the middle.
If there's no way to specifically search and display just the basic gem, is there a way to do a double sort? First search by name, then by price?
Thanks.
Pfooti Feb 19th 2010 6:24PM
I use simpleauctions to do this (and some other stuff, like mass-buying many auctions at once). You type in "cardinal ruby", and get an intermediate screen with all the different types of auctions that match, select the uncut cardinal ruby one, and see all the uncuts. As a bonus, if you want three, just shift-click three of them and buy them all out at once.
Abbadon Feb 19th 2010 6:34PM
Thanks, I'll have to check that addon out.
Auctioneer has a quick buy feature as well. I use shift right click to make purchases. There's an added option to put a cap on the amount spent (per purchase) to prevent accidentally buying something (expensive). I've had my limit set to 60g for a while but need to up it. Otherwise, anything over the set amount has to be bought the old 3 click method.
Abbadon Feb 19th 2010 6:36PM
Thanks, I'll have to check that addon out.
Auctioneer has a quick buy feature as well. I use shift right click to make purchases. There's an added option to put a cap on the amount spent (per purchase) to prevent accidentally buying something (expensive). I've had my limit set to 60g for a while but need to up it. Otherwise, anything over the set amount has to be bought the old 3 click method.
Lolone Feb 19th 2010 6:29PM
/cheer!
Sounds like you hit some bad RNG XD
Lolone Feb 19th 2010 6:31PM
should have been a reply to basil ><
wtb delete button?
placebo Feb 20th 2010 7:55AM
I wish we could force buyouts to be used. I hate it when there are only singles of items because someone has bought out everything and re-listed and I need 12-15 of that particular item. I'm guessing there is an addon that will save me from having to click to buyout then click to confirm.
Stop listing your crap at 1g1s0c / 1g1s1c (etc)
aisenfaire Feb 21st 2010 9:37PM
"Auction ho" in the URL amuses me.