Undercutting the competition

Initially this guy might be right, it seems stupid of me to list 5 belt buckles each time I post and undercutting with 2g50s, but in one thing he isn't, I do not cancel and the next day they still all magically appear as gold in my inbox.

Why is this possible?
People see I've undercut them and cancel themselves, leaving me alone on the AH with my 5-10-15 or more belt buckles up, each in a different pricing range.
As the day goes by, demand changes and people will buy more/less buckles, because they PvP, got gear upgrades, want to get their alt some extra slot, whatever reason, they just sell day and night.

Because of this, I don't worry about who undercut me, QA will undercut them the next time I post anyway, all I care about is the cash rolling in the next time I log in.

What is your vision on this, am I just being ignorant, should I undercut less, but more frequent to get my competition away?
I'd really like to see what you guys think about this.

Blacksmithing

Eternal Belt Buckles, the market seems to be totally left alone, I'm the only one posting lately and people still pay up to 150g each at times (every now & then a competitor, but then I'm walling it back to 40g with about 40 buckles).

I'm always out of stock and my saronite farmer(s) at times say they just need a break or simply disappear after a few days of supplying me.

The same thing goes for Titanium Rod, my enchanting scroll market pretty much sucks, but I see a lot of these being sold, apparently there's a rise in enchanters lately, for what reason I don't know, might be interesting to find out.
I haven't tried to sell Titanium Plating yet, I don't know why, just doesn't seem appealing, but it probably has it's Arena uses.
Last but not least, Titanium Weapon Chain, selling once in a while, nothing special, once people have their Season 8 weapon they won't be needing a new one of this, might explain why it's not selling well.


Epic ICC crafts still sell from time-to-time, but that demand is declining, people just get into ICC and gear up that way (probably boosted by guildies).


That was pretty much my BS market, I'm slowly starting to have a grasp on the market, or part of it and I like it.
Occasionally a blue crafted item sells, but people seem to be wanting epics so much more (only purple items will get you into raids because of the higher ilvl; Yes #$@! GearScore addon, I'm looking at you !).


How profitable is the Blacksmithing market for you guys? Any tips on crafts I am missing?

Steady income, no excuse policy (part 2)

Yesterday's post was about the individual person him/herself. Today will be about helping a friend, a guild mate or yourself through them.

As a player who doesn't have the money to invest in materials and supply someone for craftables, you could offer your services to your guild mates in return for a small fee, using that as investment to get better recipes, your own materials or being able to just diversify your wares.

But as a fellow (rich?) guild mate and a good person, you can help the poorer while they are helping you!

Let them farm for you, anything can be beneficial to them, old content, new content, mining, herbing, skinning, enchanting, tailoring or whatever market you're participating in, they can supply you.

Another thing you could do to help them is let them craft the things you can't and give them a nice tip, that will keep them happy and maybe they'll suggest to do other things for you too, it will always be a win-win situation.

Another option is dragging them along in the Argent Tournament dailies, they are all done faster together than alone and they will see it's decent (daily) income too. You'll be happy because you finished this faster, the other person is happy with the gold he just racked together.

Next time if you see someone whining about not having gold, offer them to supply you with materials.

If you're the one who's struggling with gold, consider supplying someone you know, do your dailies and find your niche market, but the most important thing is diversify!

Steady income, no excuse policy (part 1)

People are still complaining they don't have gold and use more excuses for it than you could imagine.

• "I don't _ have_ as much time as you do"
• "I _have_ to raid, so I can't make gold all the time"
• "I _need_ epic flying to make gold, else it's too slow"

Seeing the pattern there? People blame others for being able to get gold so 'easy', but basically they are too lazy to bother making gold themselves!

People don't need to raid, but want to, they don't need to have a lot of time, just spend it wise and you can make gold without ever leaving town too, so all of that are just excuses to cover their laziness.

Daily quests might be boring, but they are the best way to ensure anyone of a steady income, every single day.

Effort has to be put into something to be able to reap the benefits from your hard work, without the will or the right attitude to make any gold, you will never be able to get any.

Which concludes this first part of this post, there's plenty of gold around, you just need to be willing to do the effort to make it. Time is there in abundance, it all depends how you plan & execute the things you do.

Book of Glyph Mastery

Now is the time to stack up on these sweet books, in cataclysm a lot less people will be able to farm them effectively in WotLK content and a lot people probably will be interested in the new Inscription system that will be implemented alongside with Cataclysm.

But if people are lacking glyphs they won't sell, which is why they need the books, 57 of them, each person.
You can't have enough of these books, if you don't want to bother with the glyphs, bug the ones crafting them with your ridiculous prices on the books.

Don't forget to stock up on herbs, any kind of herbs, vanilla, TBC, WotLK, stack them all up, they will rise in value and a lot.
The Ink Trader will most likely disappear, so easy ink conversion will be no more, materials will become more expensive, which leads to more expensive glyphs, or just another inflation and a lot of Scribes not bothering with it anymore.

You're never prepared enough, your stock is never big enough and you will profit from cataclysm like no other.

Honour Bots, BG farmers and the JC market

At first I was disgusted by these players, I said and kind of still stand by something I said before; buying gems through honour ruined the JC market.
Yet this is how you can easily make profit and go from 1000g to 2000g in 1 day/week if you're willing to put some time & effort in it.

Since I've been on an investing spree lately I thought, whatever, time to buy up everything below a certain price, cut or uncut and relist or cut & list them at my own price.
I try to keep the gem prices above 110g, but this only seems doable for the normal gems (Red, Blue & Yellow), the hybrids go for a lot less and also don't sell as frequent.

Because of this, my total income from JC has exponentially improved, people seem to know my crafter a bit better and I'm mass buying anything I come across on trade, no matter how much they try to sell.
Gems will always sell at this point, so I can't have enough.

Both the rare and epic gem market have been attacked by me for about 1 week now and some people are disappearing due to my very frequent post, cancel/repost or a simple buy/relist and draining their supply.
I hope this won't be a short success just like my inscription market is/was.

After my success I wonder, are there any other people doing well in this(or any other) market around this time (approaching the end of WotLK).
And last but not least, what is your opinion on the honour gems?

Snatching the hog

I have been thinking about this, I've currently added it to my snatch list for 14K, but I might increase that to 15K.
Why would I do such a foolish thing you wonder? -- Cataclysm! --
Think about how people will still want it for their goblin/worgen alts, but the material supply has run dry, the price will sky-rocket and that 15K hog just became worth double or more!

Long term investing is worth it, as long you're willing to sit it out.

Stockpiling Dailies

Hello again, I know it's been a while, but honestly, I'm a bit out of creative ideas, never thought it would be so hard.

Daily Quests can be profitable we all know that, but it's roughly 'only' 300g+ per hour, but you could get more out of them, a lot more even!
With Cataclysm coming, barely no one will bother with wotlk dailies anymore, but they still would love to get the pets, that's where your daily quests will kick in.
Keep doing those dailies every day on as much characters as you're willing to do it, stockpile those pets and after about a month after cataclysm is released slowly, really slowly put them on the market again.

People will create new worgen, goblins or just other alts that weren't previously possible (cow paladin, BE warrior, human hunters etc), but once a collector, always a collector, they most likely would like to have pets on their new fancy characters too.
Stockpiling those things that are easy accessible, but require a little effort will generate the most profit time/gold invested vs gold earned in the long run.

To aid yourself in getting those Argent Tournament tokens slightly quicker, you should/could do ToC HC for the extra 3 tokens, team up with people and the dailies will be done in no-time too, it's more time efficient (so more gold per hour) and faster & less boring than when you'd have to kill those quest mobs alone.

Don't waste your time waiting for your auctions to sell, do dailies in between, spend time even more efficient and reap the benefits from that in the long run.

Mining, the other crafting profession

Now that I have leveled my prot warrior to 80, I decided I could use a miner and I choose this character to become my mining slave till 450.

On my adventure to level mining time/cost efficient I saw that ores were cheaper than the bars, once the materials were obtained past the initial leveling zones.
I used the auction house to level up my mining as I do with almost any other profession, gold boosting it.
But I made a profit instead, I was boosting my gold with my 'gathering' profession instead of boosting my profession with gold, it was amazing.

So much people seem to just read what items they need and if it's on the AH for a bit cheaper than the next, they immediately buy the bars up, even if it costs 120g for a stack!
I used this to my advantage, ores were most of the time 10-30% cheaper than the bars and because I had to level mining anyway, I simply bought out all the ores, pressed the create all button and did things in real life.
The most profitable 3 minutes of my wow career, it has been well spend and now I have reached 450 mining (saronite gathering was a bit blergh I'd have to admit), I will use this way of making profit more often.

The downside of doing this kind of flipping is that you'll have to manually check the prices, auctioneer doesn't really have a category for it (yet).
Profit is profit so it's always worth a try.
I realise this isn't entirely new information, but refreshment is needed at times.

Instead of using mining as a gathering profession, it very well can be a really good crafting profession!

Go forth and roll your copper coin (ore?) and amass your desired gold goal!

Thunderclap

First of all, sorry for the delayed posting, I've been somewhat busy in real life with moving, I'm currently waiting for some things to be delivered even.
I've also been putting a bit more time into leveling my prot warrior alt (did I ever say they are totally awesome? no? Prot warriors are so cool, PvE, PvP, solo or in groups, they're beasts and massive fun!)

Anyway the glyphstorm was a short success or somewhat a fail, I wasn't prepared enough and my stack was insufficient, my competitors let me have most if not all of the market and I was unable to keep up with the demand.
I ran out of glyphs in no-time and re-crafting took too long for me to continue.

I will restock up to 1 stack of each glyph to re-initiate my glyphstorm and craft more frequent.
Also I will adjust my fallback & threshold to allow minor competition, which will hopefully drain their supplies.
I keep buying herbs and eternal life's to keep my usual crafting up (Darkmoon cards, off-hands and such).

Doing the managing on 1 char should theoretically be doable, seeing as there are 345 glyphs and Pack of Endless Pockets provides you with 32 slots each, 11 total bags (4 on your character and 7 in your bank) will allow you to fill (32*11=)352 slots of bag space.
This shows it is perfectly possible to manage your glyph industry on 1 character (or 2 if you send all of it an alt and crafting with your 'main'/(crafting)alt).

I'll just have to keep up on stocking and abuse my guildbank ( soon buying/making a second guild..) to keep up with my supply and the demand from other players.

Hope this will give you guys a little information in case you want to start your own glyph war, I certainly learned a little bit from it and will improve my posting, pricing and crafting methods.

Evaluation: your stock can never ever be big enough, but you can manage an industry on 1 character if you put your mind to it.

Keep your coppers rolling, invest as much as you can and your stockpile is never ever big enough.