What I don't understand is the pricing of manufactured goods LOWER than the cost of the materials to make them. And I would also like to publicly flog people who post 100 single items that stack to 20.

Prices are set by the value that the buyer places on the good/service. The problem with the WoW Auction House is that we have no idea what things are selling for. We know what they're being posted for, but that's not a very good proxy.

That said, there are a bunch of reasons why you might sell a crafted good for less than the materials: one of them is that you used the materials to skill up, and having 40g for all of your gems now is worth more to you than spreading out those sales and getting 10g more per gem over time. There's a time-value of gold in WoW directly analogous to the time-value of money in the real world: having 10g now is always better than having 10g 3 months from now.

All that to say that just because YOU think that taking your time and selling the gems for a larger markup, but more slowly, is better, doesn't mean that the other buyer shares your opinion on the value of the gold. If, for example, you've got 15,000g in the bank, and everything you've ever wanted to buy is bought, you have no need to have the gold rightnow. If the other person is still saving for their flying mount and is getting really sick of running along the ground, having all of that gold ASAP is worth more to them.

Hank, depends on how you define cost; buying mats from the AH means you are paying for the actual effort required to obtain that material, but you are also paying the seller's desired profit, which may be quite substantial; not paying this profit (e.g. by farming them) directly lowers the cost of an item manufactured from these materials.

I got a worse story. Somebody bought a couple stacks of adamantite arrows. All fine and good, but then he went and split the stacks into SINGLE ARROWS and reslisted them! 16 Pages of single adamantite arrows. I wanted to kill him.

Clarisse, I'm not convinced that "most people" *do* want stacks on the AH. When I'm buying (for example) Arcane Dust, what I'm generally looking for is what suits my needs right now, which is usually one or two Dust. I'm not looking to stock up. My experience is that most people do the same thing; if they have to buy a stack, they're going to use what they need and then relist the rest of the stack.

My tactic has generally been to list enchanting mats in stacks of 5, which lets me catch the eye of the "one or two" crowd" without overwhelming the AH with listings.

mensrea, actually, the price at which things are listed *can* be a reasonable approximation of the price at which things are sold, given two prerequisites: first, that you have a (relatively) large amount of data over a (relatively) long time, and second, that your fellow auctioneers aren't dumb. If the other people on the AH aren't dumb, when something doesn't sell, they'll relist it at a different price - either lower (on the assumption that the item was more than everybody wanted to pay) or higher (on the assumption that if something's priced really high, people will assume that it's worth it). Either way, you get the benefit of them refining their auction house prices - but only if you've got the first part down, which is scanning regularly over a long period. Once or twice daily (you certainly don't need to scan more often than twice daily) for a week or two should give you a good idea of what current market prices are; if you don't get a price for an item, that means you get to set your own (since nobody else is selling it!).

katsuya, that is obnoxious. Unlike profession mats, I think people probably generally buy ammo a stack at a time. Who on earth thinks that one arrow per auction is a good idea? (Maybe the idea was that less-savvy players would just buy them up, thinking there was nothing else on the AH?)

katsuya: thats when you dont buy any of it and let him have alllll the fun of opening 200+emails for auctions expirations hehe seriously who does that

dude, death to people posting 40 arcane dusts 1 at a time. Death.

As one of those SOBs who post arcane dust one at a time, single stacks are only ones that sell. I can list dust in stacks of 4, 5, 8, 10, or 20 and get them all back unsold. I list them as singles for 30% more and they sell every time. Buyers want them as singles and they're willing to pay more to get them that way.

Now I do think there should be a limit on the number of auctions you can have for each item. I only post about a dozen singles at a time and refresh them as they sell. The clowns posting 50 to 100 items at a time need to smacked down.

Hmmm... sounds like someone's having a cranky day!

While everyone else is working on those bridges, I'd suggest making yourself a boat, taking that attitude, and shoving off.

To get back to the topic of the article, I actually LOVE the people who post far under market value--they're practically giving you money!

I found this to be particularly true in a couple commodity markets--most notably cloth. The more the price fluctuates, the more room you have to buy up everything below what you consider to be "reasonable" and profit by reposting at your price.

For example, if I pull up Linen Cloth and buy all the stacks that are listed for 10 to 85 silver and repost them at, say, 1g per stack times 40 stacks, I've made myself a nice chunk of change. In my experience, the higher the level of the trade good, the more stable the market, but the more profit can be made when someone does undercut everyone else.

Does this take a little start-up cash? Yes. Is it risky. Of course. Can it be profitable? Extremely.

And of course, the big protip: If you can buy a full stack of netherweave cloth for anything less than 3g, you are guaranteed a cash return. It's amazing how many stacks I pull off the AH for under 2 gold.

Happy shopping!

I think your last sentence here is the key. I can't tell you how much money I have made by playing the players. if i see the "king" of our auction house has the lowest price on something I have a lot of, I undercut him by about 20%. That is the price point where I KNOW it will sell because HE is going to buy it to relist.

I just did this with Runed Living Rubies last Tuesday. He had about 20 of them listed at 70. I had been stocking up throughout the week and proceeded to post a dozen of them at 55 each. I then got on an alt and whispered him that somebody had flooded the auction house and undercut him. Two minutes later I had 660 gold in my inbox and he had 12 new Runed Living Rubies in his bank. I got my money now, he gets an extra 180 if he sells them all this week, which he will, and everyone wins.

Except the poor saps paying 70 gold for a Runed Living Ruby. But I guess that's what you get when you have one guy on the server with 600K gold spread over 4 toons. He gets to make the pricing rules.

Cut gems sell for less because the market consists solely of the people who want that specific gem. Thus they won't sell as fast, if at all. It's easy to find a 375 JC who will cut anything for a small fee or even free, so it's much better to have uncut gems of given colors. Same situation goes with primals, which can be used by nearly every trade skill to craft numerous items.

Nice article.