Gold Capped: Inventory balancing in TradeSkillMaster
by Basil Berntsen 
Aug 4th 2011 at 5:00PM
TradeSkillMaster is the most powerful addon used to automate crafting and batch posting, and today, we'll be learning how to fine-tune the number of items created based on your selling history. Generally, when you started using TSM, you set up a default number of items for each trade skill group that you wanted it to keep in stock. For example, I told it to:
- Always craft enough scrolls that I had two on the auction house when they were profitable.
- Always craft enough of each meta-gem cut to ensure that I always had three on the AH when they were profitable.
Balancing act
I have a bunch of expensive bracer enchants and meta-gem cuts that are very popular -- so popular, in fact, that I need to make many times more of these than the next most popular items just to keep from selling out on a raid night or weekend. I also have a few items that sell really terribly and mostly cost me money to relist every day. Ideally, I'd like to balance my inventory to reflect this and keep more of the items on the AH that sell better.
Firstly, click on the TSM button on your minimap to bring up the options. Click your trade skill on the left, and then select one of the recipe categories. You are presented with a complete picture of what you can craft, and only the ones you've checked will appear in the crafting wizard.
Before you adjust your crafting levels, you need to decide how many you want to keep in stock. I base that on the number I've sold. While TSM's live version doesn't have a built-in sale tracker, it does track how many items you've crafted, and that's good enough for me.
A good rule of thumb is to start with your most popular item and decide how many you want to make of that. From there, set the quantities of all the other items proportionally. If you sold 20 of your best-seller and decide you want to keep 10 on the AH at all time, divide the sold amounts for everything else by two to get a rough idea how much you should stock. If you sold 45 and want to stock five, divide sold items by nine to get your rough target.
The long part of this process if going through every single item you craft to set the levels. This is done by clicking on the Additional Item Settings:
Check the Override Max Restock Quantity button to let TSM know you want to manually manage this one, then change the value I've circled to the number of items you want to queue up every time you craft.
The way the queue works, it will queue up enough items to be crafted so you have your max restock quantity on your character (including bags, the bank, and the AH, but not the mail). If you override a minimum restock quantity, it will wait until you're missing that many before queuing anything. I generally only need the first checkbox.
The way the queue works, it will queue up enough items to be crafted so you have your max restock quantity on your character (including bags, the bank, and the AH, but not the mail). If you override a minimum restock quantity, it will wait until you're missing that many before queuing anything. I generally only need the first checkbox.
Quantities
Now when you click Restock Queue, you'll be presented with a list of (hopefully profitable) items to make, where the quantity produced vaguely matches the popularity of the item. Unless you want to be left with a bag full of sellable items, though, you have to remember to go and doublecheck your groups. If you remember when you set them up, you defined a maximum quantity of items you wanted listed at once. If this was lower than some of the new restock maximums you defined, you should adjust it. You can do this by changing the category rules, unless you overrode the category maximum on certain groups (or imported from an older version of the addon that didn't support categories).
I generally set the group max quantity quite high for businesses where I craft frequently, reasoning that I'll control how much I post on the AH by how much I create. There are some businesses where I have massive amounts of stock backed up that I wouldn't want to post all at once.
Demand and price
Remember now that price is a balance between supply and demand. The more stock you post at a competitive price, the lower the price will generally be. A surge of demand, for example, won't necessarily burn through all the cheap stock and start nipping at the more expensive auctions if you've posted a lot of cheap stock. The reason for increasing your inventory levels this way is actually not more margin, but it is more raw profit. Assuming you only queue or sell items when they're actually profitable, you'll sell more this way by having larger amounts of popular items in stock to meet demand, and while you might be keeping the price down compared to what it would have been if you had sold out, someone else would have been making those sales.
Maximize your profits with more advice from Gold Capped. Do you have questions about selling, reselling, and building your financial empire on the auction house? Fox and Basil are taking your questions at fox@wowinsider.com and basil@wowinsider.com.
Filed under: Economy, Gold Capped
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
wutsconflag Aug 4th 2011 6:36PM
It doesn't seem like this would help certain markets all that much (like Inscription) since demand doesn't fluctuate all that often (except possibly when a new glyph is introduced, or possibly when an old unwanted glyph is change - but even then, it seems like most people buy all of the glyphs even if they'll never use most of them).
That said, this is excellent information to have. Thanks!
Aeghadrix Aug 4th 2011 7:27PM
TradeSkillMaster Accounting is available from curse and tracks all your sales and purchases from the AH.
Basil Berntsen Aug 4th 2011 7:28PM
I'll have to install it. Last time I checked (not recently), it was still being tested.
Koleckai Aug 4th 2011 9:56PM
This doesn't work across characters does it? I do something similar but since my crafting is done on different characters than I sell on, I do it manually.
gewalt Aug 5th 2011 9:15AM
it does. as long as the appropriate TSM modules are enabled for each toon
Peebers Aug 5th 2011 7:47PM
Dps Q has nothing on the time it takes to set-up ad learn TSM. Wish I had the patience. Or a help line I could call, sheesh.
Can anybody recommend some good how to videos? That aren't in an Australian accent prefferably. Thanks!
arc Aug 6th 2011 3:23PM
In my TSM setup most of my craft queues are 2.5x that of my posting cap e.x. if my auction group rules for scrolls is a posting cap of 2 then my crafting stock queue is 5. I do this mainly to combat undercutting and canceling/mailbox time in addition to having extra stock to list after sales.
There are times when certain items will have high demand and/or a large profit margin and it's good to stock more of these rather than use spend mats on less saleable/profitable crafts. However, there is another situation where it's good to keep large quantities of crafts and that's when there isn't any better outlet for the mats. The best examples of this involves rare blue, yellow, and green gem cuts. I'll make sure to keep a stock between 10-20 of the 'viable' cuts even if they aren't profitable at the time because I never want to miss an opportunity to sell them when they do become profitable.