Posts with tag undercutting

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

Glyph pricing has ignited more internet arguments than any other topic in the WoW blogosphere. Everyone has their own method, and there's always someone who gets offended by it. There is no actual right answer, just basic economics.

The goal of any glyph strategy is to make gold, and the only sensible way to measure gold making is by calculating your profits per hour. The glyph lifecycle is herb > pigment > ink > glyph. There can be a lot of hours in that, so let's look at the best way to squeeze some gold from them.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! This week's community post is the most recent recording of the weekly JMTC's meeting, and I'll be there next week answering questions.

This isn't the first time I've written about undercutting, and it won't be the last. The burning question of how much to undercut is something that just keeps coming up, not unlike the question of which pet is the best for the DPS.

If you ask people who don't sell on the AH, they'll give you a blank stare and make some comment about having a guildie craft it. If you ask an auctioneer with less than 100k, they'll say to never undercut more than a copper. To properly answer this question, we need to try and understand the effect that undercutting has on the market you're in.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. For Gold Capped's inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in here every Thursday, and email Basil with your comments, questions or hate mail! This week's gold blogosphere post is Cold's post on Cataclysm profitable commodities.

In a thread in the comments on my last article in which I had advised a reader to undercut his glyph competition heavily instead of camping the auction house, I got another comment that got me thinking about pricing. It basically stated that every time the commenter undercut heavily on glyphs, he would immediately get re-undercut by a few copper unless his price was down to the point of no profit.

I've written a little about the topic of pricing and undercutting before, but I felt it was time for a refresher. I'm going to start off by quoting what I wrote last March: "If everyone is knocking a copper off the next highest auction, they only way to undercut successfully is to try camp the AH and make sure you're always the competitor who has visited most recently. Needless to say, this is a colossal waste of your time." This is as true now as it was then.

I, Robin Torres, would like to state clearly and for the record that as a casual player, I am all for the price undercutting wars going on between the AH PvP types. What is AH PvP? It's the sub-game that is played in the auction house among players fighting to make the most money they can while trying to drive other players out of their markets. It can be vicious and lead to tons of trade chat drama, but oh, I love it so.

It's not that I am all for people being mean to each other. Oh, no. I'm on record for being very much against that. But I think that players' trying to undercut each other on my local AH leads to a big win for me and my crafting alts: bargain prices. Whether it is just a casual player's using Auctioneer carelessly and selling stuff at accidentally low prices or a big war between mat vendors, if I time my purchases correctly, I win -- and honestly, so does everyone else trying to buy the affected items. This, of course, mirrors real life. When stores have price-cutting wars, observant consumers win. Duh.

Every week, Gold Capped brings you tips on how to make money on the auction house. This article from inscription specialist Steve Zamboni has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com.

Almost all auction house tactics revolve around the undercut. It may be a single copper, a few silver or a few gold, or a freefall drop down to the price of materials. Regardless of the amount or the frequency, most undercuts share a common misconception: that you're controlling the market with your undercuts. You're not. Your competitor has the control. By undercutting, you've just let your competitor decide your price. You've let your competitor set a cap on your profits -- and more, you've agreed to accept even less with your undercut.

The inscription market sees more than its fair share of this, sometimes on a large scale. The low deposits encourage large number of postings, followed by even larger numbers of cancellations and repostings. Prices fall as each new poster accepts and trumps the previous poster's prices, until the market falls to the cost of materials and the walls go up. The final wall signals a complete loss of market control.

Once it's up, it no longer matters who built the wall. If it's your wall, you can't raise prices until the competition perched above you goes away. If it's not your wall, you can't raise prices on your auctions until someone breaks the wall. Stalemate, and out come the piña coladas.

Welcome to Time Is Money! This is the column where Basil "Euripides" Berntsen is occasionally allowed to post stuff that's too short for Gold Capped, but too long for Twitter. Have comments or questions about the in-game economy? Email Basil!

We received a note from a reader this week, and I felt it was appropriate to get the Drama Mamas involved. While this is a situation somewhat unique to auctioneers, it certainly has dramatic potential!

I hear this all the time: "Hurrr! Undercutters are ruining this market! Durrr!". Today, we're going to talk about this. Undercutting doesn't ruin markets, high supply does. Also, if it's still profitable, the market's not ruined, it's just being taken away from you. Cut your margins and undercut back. Or buy them out if you still think they're wrong and you're right.

But markets should be protected from undercutters!

Balderdash. Markets are a place where people can sell their goods for any price they want. You're describing collusion between sellers to reduce "lost profits," where every time someone wants to undercut with a new auction, they do so by the smallest possible amount.

More often than not, all your competitors will have the same cost that you do, and as soon as they see you commit to an auction, they'll undercut you right back. If everyone is knocking a copper off the next highest auction, they only way to undercut successfully is to try camp the AH and make sure you're always the competitor who has visited most recently. Needless to say, this is a colossal waste of your time, and you would probably make more money per hour doing argent tourney dailies.

The only way to effectively sell your product in a market with a lot of competitors is to undercut by more than just a trivial amount. You need to make it just cheap enough that your competition is less likely to undercut you, but expensive enough that you're still making money.

Want to get Gold Capped? This column will show you how, and is written by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, also of outdps.com, the hunting party podcast, and the call to auction podcast.

Auctioneer is a wonderful addon I've mentioned a few times already, and today we're going to talk about how to use it to sell your goods efficiently. First up, go download and install it. Now, when you open the auction house, you will see a different interface. We'll be going over a bunch of other useful functionality this has in another post, but today, we're focusing on selling. Do a quick scan by clicking on the fast forward arrow:


You should make a point of scanning the AH this way as often as possible, but generally not more than a few times a day. I do it every two days, or whenever I need the data. This allows auctioneer to learn what items are worth in your economy, by keeping track of the listing price over time.

The economy in WoW has some interesting nuances. Players spend oodles of WoW gold on their crafting professions, and sometimes manage to turn a tidy profit. I'm often surprised to see some items that are strongly in-demand, like Light Feathers. Shrewd players use the auction house to build their bankrolls. Lomentari of EU-Draenor is exasperated with people who fail to use the auction house "properly."

She is angry that other crafters are selling the same product she creates for several gold lower than her preferred price. The items are placed on the auction house en masse at the low low rate, which the original poster blames on Leather Workers skilling up. She feels powerless to do anything about her "massive money loss." The original poster is willing to accept small cuts in pricing, but has a hard time deal with steep declines in prices.