Gold Capped: How to handle undercutters

WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make gold on the Auction House. Check out Basil's gold making podcast, Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

I hear this all the time: "Every time I post anything, someone undercuts me within minutes." Luckily, there's a relatively simple solution to dealing with undercutters: ignore them. You don't ignore them hoping they go away, you ignore them because they aren't actually going to prevent you from selling your auctions.

Think back to the last time you bought something from the Auction House; let's say an enchant. You search for the best enchant you can put onto the gear. If the lowest price is affordable, you buy it. If it feels too expensive (compared to what you've paid before or what you know the materials cost), you might buy the mats and ask friends or trade chat for someone to make it for you. You might instead look at the second best enchant for the gear if it's something you won't be wearing for long or you're not expected to always use best-in-slot enchants.

This is how your buyers are going to act. If someone undercuts you immediately after you post, the next buyer is likely to get their item instead of yours. The one after that, however, is going to have to get yours. What you really want to look at is the number of items that get posted below yours. Most people who undercut do it with a low quantity so that they can more easily cancel and relist auctions while they're stalking the AH. They don't close the loop, though; they don't realize that they spend more time away from the AH than in front of it, and that this time is given back to you once their inventory dries up.

Story time

Back in Wrath of the Lich King, I would make a lot of belt buckles. I'd get frustrated when I crafted them only to see the price drop below my target price within a day. Undercutting was insane: on a raid night, my post would last a couple of minutes before it got undercut. I couldn't react by standing there and babysitting my auctions, because it was raid night. I had to raid!

The price before I had to log over to my raiding character was about the same as the price I'd see when my raid finished and I checked before logging out for the night, so I assumed that anything above that price wouldn't sell. I tested this by posting 60 or so at a much higher price, expecting to see them all come back, but they sold! Not all of them, but most of them. I am sure that I was undercut many times that night, but the demand was strong enough that every time the cheap stock sold out, the next few sales went to me.

I experimented with this for a few weeks and found that the higher I pegged my auctions, the fewer I'd sell, but I almost never needed to beat the lowest price on the AH at the time I posted in order to make sales. I picked a price that would sell the quantity I was willing to craft per week, and just fixed it there. I wouldn't make any sales some days, but inevitably on a weekly cycle, I'd sell everything I was able to craft.

This was fine and dandy, but my competitors caught on. They started crafting more and babysitting as much as ever instead of posting just a few at the lowest price, and suddenly we were back to where we started -- my auctions would come back unsold much more frequently. I had two choices: either go back to living with a tiny share of the market because I couldn't babysit my auctions, or lower my prices. I lowered my prices, reasoning that even if I didn't raid, I'd probably be better off spending the time they spend babysitting and stalking competitors getting into some other market.

This worked. As I've said before, lowering the price of something increases the number that sell. When people are deciding whether to buy something or not, there are almost always alternatives. The cheaper something is, the fewer people will elect to substitute a cheaper alternative, have it crafted by a friend, or simply do without.

Now that the prices on belt buckles were about 20% lower than they were before, there was so much more demand that I started to see sales again. A lot of them, in fact. Even considering that I was making about half the profit per buckle at this price, I was making more profit. I had to work (buying mats and crafting) more for the profit, but instead of this being a contest of who could spend more time in the AH, it became a contest of who could buy cheaper and craft more efficiently.

Walling

This can be called a "wall" of auctions. The problem with walling is that you can undershoot or overshoot on the price and size of your wall. I've posted a wall of, for example, uncut red gems that were coming out of the seams of my bank, only to sell through them all in a single night and be stuck without enough to use for my crafting on the next big raid night. What I've started doing on certain things I sell is to make my "wall" actually be several smaller walls. On Mists of Pandaria belt buckles, I'll post a large number at my wall price that I know sell reasonably, but since the materials are cooldown based and I'm vulnerable to being completely bought out for a reset, I'll keep 30% of my stock up for maybe 50% higher than the main group.

Resets

Resets are a post in and of themselves, but for the purpose of this article, essentially it's when you notice that all your items sell to a single person in a single sitting, usually a competitor's character. It's most common on items where there is either a cooldown or some sort of natural limitation on the materials. This is an opportunity for everyone else to profit, as the resetter has to buy a lot of items to create a shortage of inventory among their competitors. Think of it like an immediate surge in demand -- if you can normally sell 100 of something for 500g each a week, a resetter while they're actively trying to reset could make that 300 at 750g. Having a portion of your inventory up for higher than the rest will pay dividends once the demand pushes the price up that high. It may rarely be due to normal players, but it makes resetting more expensive. Maximize your profits with advice from Gold Capped. Want to know the very best ways to earn 10,000 gold? Top gold making strategies for auctioneers? How about how to reach 1 million gold -- or how one player got there and then gave it all away? Fox and Basil are taking your questions at fox@wowinsider.com and basil@wowinsider.com. Tags: auction-house, dealing-with-undercutters, featured, gold, gold-guide, gold-making, gold-strat, gold-strategy, gold-strats, gold-tips, undercutters, world-of-warcraft-gold, wow-ah, wow-gold, wow-gold-guide, wow-gold-strategy, wow-money-guide, wow-money-making-guide

Filed under: Economy, Gold Capped, Mists of Pandaria

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Gold Capped: Train Nomi for free Ironpaw Tokens

"Every" week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

After writing my Ironpaw Shuffle guide, JessicaHealy posted a very insightful tip in the comments, which I had actually missed from all the way back in November on the Consortium professions forum: the Cooking School Bell is an investment that's well worth the price of 50 Ironpaw Tokens. If you have completed To Be a Master and finished leveling your cooking, you can buy the bell which will let you summon Nomi, your very own trainee!

Nomi has his own reputation faction that you need to do daily quests to complete, and once that's done, he'll provide you with a one time gift of 5 of your choice of token-bought food, and then daily Tokens of Appreciation, which rewards a free Ironpaw Token.

Luphian, in the Wowhead comments, calculated the time it takes to get exalted:

Non-human, and no guild perk:

1000 reputation a day: 42 days, but four times through these quests, we will get two daily quests, because of the new gained friendship level. This 4000 reputation removes four days, so it will take 38 days to get exalted.

Human OR Guild-Perk (10% extra reputation):

1100 reputation a day: 39 days - but four times through these quests, we will get two daily quests, because of the new gained friendship level. This 4400 reputation removes four days, so it will take 35 days to get exalted.

Human AND Guild Perk (20% extra reputation):

1200 reputation a day: 35 days - but four times through these quests, we will get two daily quests, because of the new gained friendship level. This 4800 reputation removes four days, so it will take 31 days to get exalted.

Once this is done, in 50 days you will have the 50 tokens you spent to get the bell. If you're using the tokens to buy Soy Sauce, Rice Flour, or Black Pepper, it'll only take 45 days if you consider the reward you get for getting exalted.
Maximize your profits with advice from Gold Capped. Want to know the very best ways to earn 10,000 gold? Top gold making strategies for auctioneers? How about how to reach 1 million gold -- or how one player got there and then gave it all away? Fox and Basil are taking your questions at fox@wowinsider.com and basil@wowinsider.com. Tags: ah, auction-house, cooking, cooking-school-bell, gold, gold-making, gold-tip, halfhill, ironpaw-shuffle, ironpaw-token, nomi

Filed under: Economy, Gold Capped, Mists of Pandaria

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Gold Capped: Inscription gold-making guide

"Every" week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

Have a scribe? Need gold? Look no farther. Inscription is one of the best gold-making professions in the game. You can make glyphs, Darkmoon cards, and all kinds of other odds and ends. Each of these markets has a characteristic time investment requirement and potential profit. Each realm is going to be different, but in general: Darkmoon cards: Scalable time investment, massive profitsGlyphs: Massive time investment, low profitOdds and ends: Minimal time investment, medium profitDarkmoon cards start off simply enough: if you do your daily research, you can make a card a day. Different cards have different values, but on average, you'll make back way more than the value of the inks. You can trade cards, and the more cards you make, the better efficiency you'll have making decks. Assuming you can make a full deck for every 12 cards you produce (which is the ratio you see if you trade really well and/or produce a lot of cards), it'll cost you 120 stacks of any herb but Fool's Cap, or 75 stacks of Fool's Cap. At 40g per stack of, for example, Green Tea Leaf, that's 4800g per deck. Some decks can sell for over 20,000g.

"Going big" increases your production and decreases your waste. How does one make a lot of cards, though? Since they're tied to a daily cooldown, the options are to buy the cooldown from other scribes, or to have multiple scribes. This is why I call the time investment "scalable". You'll do perfectly well making a card a day and trading when you can, even if you only sell the single cards on the AH. If you plan to step it up and make decks, though, you'll need to either develop a network of scribes willing to sell you their daily cooldown, or make a bunch of alts into scribes.

Glyphs are a whole other beast. I've said a few times that this market isn't worth pursuing, and to some extent, this still holds true. The main reason I'd advise against trying your hand at the glyph market is that everyone else disagrees with me, and that the profit per hour in this market is purely driven by competitors' willingness to spend more time cancelling and relisting.

Glyphs are an odd commodity in this game. There are hundreds of them, and people only need to buy them once per character. There is constant demand for new characters, and it's pretty stable and inflexible. Lowering prices drastically on a glyph doesn't result in a large increase in sales, and people are willing to spend several hundred gold on something that costs under 30 to craft.

The way the glyph market works on most realms is that there are a couple of people willing to put in the long hours who will have every available glyph posted profitably, and undercut within minutes of being undercut. They all reduce the price very minimally when undercutting, and the "competition" isn't about price, it's about who can relist more frequently. This is a very expensive way to compete unless you have unlimited playtime and have already done every other profitable action you can take. Every hour I waste relisting glyphs is an hour I can't spend managing the rest of my businesses or trying to catch up on my valor cap.

Of course, since people only see a gold loss when they lose gold they had in their hand rather than when they lose gold they could have had in their hand, this type of camping and undercutting is rampant across every realm I've heard of. One fallacy I hear a lot is that people believe that if they do it for long enough, they'll push people out of the market by making it unprofitable. Well that is certainly possible, but anyone can make glyphs unprofitable any time they want by simply undercutting heavily and crafting (and milling) a lot.

I like angry letters, so when I have time to troll my esteemed competitors, I'll go and post a "glyph wall" of 3 of each glyph for triple the materials cost. This is just expensive enough that it's not worth them buying me out, and cuts the high end of the market (the 300g glyphs that cost 15g to make) out from under them. This can be fun, not unlike popping bubble wrap. I still get undercut within an hour, but since this doesn't really drive demand up that much, I don't end up selling anything more than I would have at the high prices. That's generally when they'll mail me letting me know this.

In the end, though, I can't spend all day trolling -- they just wait for me to have better things to do and then go back to their old ways. If you're going to disregard my advice and try to get into the glyph market, the best advice I have for you is to make sure you have the most efficient possible setup, and undercut really frequently.

Odds and ends are where I go second, after selling the one Darkmoon card per day that I make. The big sellers here are the BoE shoulder enchants, but I also sell a lot of Runescrolls of Fortitude, and a couple of kites. You can use your Scrolls of Wisdom to make 476 off-hands, but they're generally worth more as single Darkmoon cards. Making Spirits of Harmony into the blue staves might be worth it, but they don't sell on my realm.

The shoulder enchants come in blue and epic versions. They're both very popular, but remember that some sell more than others. In my experience (and this holds true across both the blue and epic quality inscriptions), for every Ox inscription you sell to a tank, you'll sell: 3 Tiger Claw inscriptions to a strength DPS3 Tiger Fang inscriptions to an agility DPS5-6 Crane Wing inscriptions to caster DPS and healersFor something that takes so little space on the page, this is easily one of the best money makers, in terms of gold per hour.
Maximize your profits with advice from Gold Capped. Want to know the very best ways to earn 10,000 gold? Top gold making strategies for auctioneers? How about how to reach 1 million gold -- or how one player got there and then gave it all away? Fox and Basil are taking your questions at fox@wowinsider.com and basil@wowinsider.com. Tags: darkmoon-cards, darkmoon-decks, darkmoon-faire, glyphs, gold, gold-making, inscription, milling, scribe, scroll-of-wisdom, shoulder-enchants, wow-gold

Filed under: Economy, Gold Capped, Mists of Pandaria

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Gold Capped: How to make gold as an enchanter

"Every" week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

Enchanting can be a very good way to make gold. Every time someone gets an upgrade, the first thing they do is see whether there's an enchant they could put on it, and if so, either have someone enchant it in a trade window, or buy a scroll from the AH.

The first thing you'll need to know if you're going to get into the scroll market is that it's not a good idea to use the default interface. You will face challenges that it is simply not equipped to handle. Chiefly: Knowing whether a scroll is profitableKnowing whether you already have scrolls made and for sale
When you look at an unmodified enchanting tradeskill window, you'll see first a bunch of scrolls that don't sell (since they're from other expansions), have no idea whether they can be sold at a profit, and have no idea whether you've already made a batch and listed it for sale. Also, while I wouldn't consider this a core required function, if you do decide to make a batch of scrolls, there's no way to queue them up and see what the total materials needed will be.

The first and best answer to these problems is TradeSkillMaster. I linked Olivia's excellent guide to starting off, and the download instructions are in that post. Once you get to the part where you're choosing which items to craft, come back here!

Which scrolls?

First of all, the best scrolls can only be made if you've gotten enough reputation with the August Celestials and the Shado-Pan. If you can make these, you absolutely should. They sell very well, and are typically more profitable than the other scrolls because nobody sells these at a loss while leveling enchanting and not all enchanters can make them.

Second on the list are the non-reputation gated scrolls you can learn from the trainers. You'll want to put a tick-mark next to any enchant that says "requires a level 372 or higher item", although you want to be sure that you don't blindly craft them all. Many of these will never be sellable at a profit because they're the cheapest way to level enchanting. In any case, you want to see them all when you look at your tradeskill window, so check them all.

This is my sweet spot: a single expansion's worth of material types, no oddball reagents, and constant demand. Even the enchants that aren't best in slot for anyone will sell, as sometimes people will choose a cheaper enchant that's not completely useless over having an unenchanted item.

Lastly, you have the oddball enchants. If you can enchant BoA gear (anything without a level requirement), you will be able to make all kinds of gold. The problem is that the BoA enchants market will require you to manage many more types of dust, essences, shards, and crystals than you'll have at the latest tier. Also, a lot of the old popular enchants have stupidly hard to find non-enchanting materials that are a real pain to watch the AH for (or worse, farm for). If you want to get into this market, I'd recommend reading the Consortium enchanting list's section on BoA enchants.

Getting Materials

Now that you have TSM set up, all you need to do is create a queue for yourself, acquire the materials, craft your scrolls, and list them for sale. The first thing you should know about getting materials is that they're not worth what you paid for them, they're worth what you could sell them for. If you can reliably sell Spirit Dust for 2g each, then even if they're costing you 50 silver to make because they're a byproduct of your Jewelcrafting work, they're still worth 2g each.

Next up: the cheapest way to get Mysterious Essences is often to craft them from 5 dusts. The US Alliance average market price on essences is higher than the US Alliance average market price for 5 dust, so it's a safe bet that most of you will be able to do this sometimes. In fact, that's actually a good way to make some simple and easy money: buy cheap dust, craft it up to essences, and sell them at a profit.

For some reason, the market price for Ethereal Shards (78g, on average) tends to be low enough that it's not worth crafting them from Mysterious Essences, but it is worth using them to make Sha Crystals. Unfortunately that last step up to Sha Crystal is on a daily cooldown, so if you can make enchants that require these, you'll almost always need to get some from the AH.

There is no way to craft epic gear for less than the average price of a Sha Crystal that I've heard of, but there are many ways to craft lesser gear to profitably disenchant. Jewelcrafting is still the largest source of these, with the green and blue jewelery from the uncommon gems, as well as the 450 blue jewelery you can make from Serpent's Eyes. There are low level greens you can make with other professions, but with the recent nerf to ore drop rates, the blacksmithing one isn't worth it any more, and with the average price of Windwool being so high on average, the Tailoring one wasn't ever worth it.

Maximize your profits with advice from Gold Capped. Want to know the very best ways to earn 10,000 gold? Top gold making strategies for auctioneers? How about how to reach 1 million gold -- or how one player got there and then gave it all away? Fox and Basil are taking your questions at fox@wowinsider.com and basil@wowinsider.com. Tags: enchanting, enchants, gold, gold-making, scrolls, selling-enchants, tradeskillmaster, tsm, wow-gold

Filed under: Economy, Gold Capped, Mists of Pandaria

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Gold Capped: Cheap Ironpaw Tokens

"Every" week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen and Fox Van Allen aim to show you how to make money on the Auction House. Check out Basil's re-reboot of Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

Feasts are expensive, but are still cheaper than everyone bringing their own food. The reason they're expensive is that they all require an ingredient that can only be bought with an Ironpaw Token, the 100 Year Soy Sauce. Ironpaw Tokens are a non-tradable currency obtained by doing quests (including dailies, or a weekly if you're a scribe), and their short supply can be a real limiting factor on leveling cooking. Leveling the "ways" of cooking requires a lot of tokens, and once they're leveled, using them requires a lot more. If you rely on dailies for these, you'll never have enough.

A better way

Luckily for us, you don't have to rely on dailies! The first thing I noticed when I was first exploring Halfhill was that Nam Ironpaw, the token vendor, had a repeatable quest called Replenishing the Pantry that asked for a Bundle of Groceries. Once I worked my way past the Preserving Freshness quest, he did, at least. Anyways, essentially, you can buy an empty container from Merchant Cheng (next to the seed vendor) which can be right clicked on to consume some quantity of cooking materials to make a Bundle of Groceries. This can be turned into an Ironpaw Token.
You can buy empty containers for meat, vegetables, and fish: Meat: It takes a single stack of 20 of any of the types of accepted meat.Fish: It's generally one stack for fish, however it's three stacks for Golden Carp, which are a lot easier to obtain, and therefor cheaper.Vegetables: It takes a single stack of 100 of any of the types of accepted veggies.Any time you want to level cooking or make some feasts for raiding and are considering the purchase of something that can be purchased with a token, you should see whether you're best off buying one off the AH or making it by buying stacks of ingredients for trading in.

The Ironpaw Shuffle

Anything that can be used to generate gold with minimal use of your asdf keys can be called a shuffle, it seems. Elen, also from El's Extreme Anglin', over on The Consortium coined the term "Ironpaw Shuffle" a few days into the expansion, so I'll use it here. If you can buy the materials to make Bundles of Groceries more cheaply than you can sell Soy Sauce, Salt, or Pepper (or, I suppose Aprons, which are also sellable), you can spend a bit of time clicking and running between the market and the mailbox for a nice tidy profit.

A nice side bonus is that this repeatable quest generates a little experience - you can park an unused alt in Halfhill to do all your turn-ins, and get some free experience.

As Elen mentioned in that linked guide, this can be a lot of clicking. Not an issue if you're only doing it once in a while, but if you're going to do it a lot or are the type of person who can't stand inefficiency, there are of course macros to help. Lelia, on page two of the guide thread, wrote these:

Meat and Fish

/use item:87658
/use item:87659
/use item:87660
/use item:87661
/use item:87662
/use item:87687
/use item:87678
/use item:87679
/use item:87680
/use item:87681
/use item:87682
/use item:87683
/use item:87684
/use item:87685
/use item:87686
/use item:87673

Veggies

/use item:87663
/use item:87664
/use item:87665
/use item:87667
/use item:87666
/use item:87669
/use item:87670
/use item:87671
/use item:87672

Simply put these into macros and click them to combine your stacks into bundles.

What sells?

Ironpaw Tokens on their own are not sellable. The three things you can buy with them that will sell reliably are the 100 Year Soy Sauce, Rice Flour, and Black Pepper. Of these, the Soy Sauce will probably sell the best, as it's used for all stat banquets. People leveling cooking will burn through a lot of these.

Interestingly, it's rarely profitable to actually cook and sell banquets yourself. So many people leveling cooking will sell the actual food below the cost of the materials. If you're going to learn the banquets, don't do it so you can "add value" to the tail end of the Ironpaw Shuffle. Also, if you are able to make them for your own reasons, before investing in the materials, check whether you can get a ready-cooked banquet for less than you could make one.

Transmute meat?

The last way you can use this system is to use the Ironpaw Tokens you've bought with cheap food to trade in for more expensive food. Each token can be used to purchase a sack of food which will contain enough ingredients for a quarter of a Bundle of Groceries. For example, you could spend 40g on 20 of the cheapest meat on the Auction House to get a token, and then use that to buy a Sack of Scallions, which will provide 25 Scallions. Or whatever other ingredient is expensive on your realm.

Scallions are expensive on my realm (probably because of the Sea Mist Rice Noodles), so this would be a good trade. You should check the Undermine Journal for your realm. Actually, the screenshot above is from their cooking page, which will list all of the items you can trade on a single table, sorted by price. Pretty handy! I'd link directly, but that would put you in a specific realm. Go to theunderminejournal.com, select your realm and faction, hover over "gathered" on the top bar, then click "cooking". If you do a lot of this, there's another macro on the Consortium thread I linked that you can use to open Sacks, which might come in useful.

Maximize your profits with advice from Gold Capped. Want to know the very best ways to earn 10,000 gold? Top gold making strategies for auctioneers? How about how to reach 1 million gold -- or how one player got there and then gave it all away? Fox and Basil are taking your questions at fox@wowinsider.com and basil@wowinsider.com. Tags: auction-house, banquets, cheap-ironpaw-token, cooking, feasts, gold, gold-making, ironpaw-shuffle, ironpaw-token

Filed under: Economy, Gold Capped, Mists of Pandaria

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