Of WoW and Gold...Part 2

Ok, some of you who read my last post on here (Creatively Called "Of WoW and Gold") . This post was geared to help people who were struggling with WoW gold, I had accrued about 475 gold with over the weekend alone, and this also happened while I Was leveling, I wasn't focused on JUST making money. After that last post, I showed it to some guildies and it got me to thinking, how much money could I make in one day if I just sat down and tried my hardest? Well I did just that yesterday, I got in WoW and spent about 2 hours just working on making gold, nothing else, just gold. My results? I have 853g in my account, that means I made about 375 gold in 1 day. And I'm only level 53, not even close to level 70, I can't wait to hit 70 and start making the SERIOUS money. Not a bad haul at all if I do say so myself though. The question is: How? Well unfortunately I would be giving away my secret if I told you exactly what I did, so I'm going to tell you the guidelines I followed.

In this article (Or post, whatever this is) I will go over my number one tool, the Auction House. The Auction house is my best friend right now and probably will be for a long time. I take EVERYTHING I have and sell it on the auction house. Even if its only 20 Mageroyals, they'll sell for 3-4 gold. My secret is not to sell rare items for large sums of money, its to sell lots of smaller more common items for little money. If I sold two items, each worth 55 gold, I would make 110 gold. If I sell 20 items worth 6g a piece, it would make 120 gold. You can see where selling smaller items can come in very handy.

Ok so you're selling stuff on the AH now, and the question that probably popped into your mind first was: What do I charge for each item? Ok this is a good question and the answer is a bit complex. Good pricing is made up of some good calculations and research, predictions, risk, and psychology. Wow, that's a lot of things to consider when putting something on the AH, do I really have to consider all of those? Well no, but I would highly advise it,lets go over each of these items in depth and see what it means for your pricing, then this might make more sense.

Calculations and Research:
This part of pricing involves taking a look at all the similar items on the market, and then undercutting (Pricing your items lower than theirs) a TINY bit. The research: you've got 20 stacks of different items to sell, do you know How long its going to take to research each item and then try to average it out? It takes a while and is almost too time consuming to be worth it. So how can you save on time? Auctioneer. That's all you need to know, its like the corny Lawyer commercials, "One Call, that's All". But in this case, its actually worth it. You can get auctioneer off of, www.curse.com. This addon will save you so much time and make researching prices so easy and fast you'll forget how you lived without it. What does it do? Ok, fair question. Auctioneer is an addon that lets you walk up the AH, open up the Auction Interface and hit the "Scan" button. This will take a while maybe 5-10 minutes depending on your server's AH size, my server takes about 8 minuites. What did it just do, it just recorded EVERY price in the AH and will pop that up in a tool tip whenever you hover over an item. This is such a cool feature, it lets you know instantly if you'll be able to make some cash off it and how much you'll make. There you go, you've now researched EVERY SINGLE item in the auction house, calculated the average sell price, and compared that to any previous scans you've done and then compares all of those and averages those out! All of this was done while you probably left your computer alone and grabbed something eat or whatever it was you did. Amazing.

Predictions:
Here's a little more gray area than research, if you check the market auctioneer price and it says that the item you're selling is going for 10 g, you may know that you've sold that item a week earlier and it went for 13 g. So here is where you have to make a prediction, will the price go back up to 13g? Or if you put it up for 13g will it just fail miserably? Prediction man to the Rescue! If you guess right, you make an extra 3g in profit. If you guess wrong? You lose the deposit money on the AH item and the time it was on the AH and the possibility of it never selling on the AH for 13g. Like the real world, you probably don't want to have an item that keeps coming back into your inventory for more than two weeks, UNLESS its a really expensive item that most people can't afford. An example of this is "The 2 Ring". This may stay on the AH for a month or more. Does this mean you should just take it down because its lemon and won't sell? Naaahhh, but for the 1000+ g that it sells for, some people probably can't afford to buy it, but if someone does? Oh baby baby baby! You've just made some sweet cash! So keep the life of an item in mind.

Risk:
This is "The Big One". These are ventures that can net you some serious cash or make you so broke you can't afford repairs. The most common of these ventures is the scheme, "Buy-out the Competitors". What does this mean? Lets look at an example, say you're selling some leather on the AH for 10g each, some new guy comes up and offers his leather for 7g. Do you lower your prices to 7g also? Well you could, OR you could BUY all of his 7g items, then put them back on the market for 10g. WooHoo! You make 3g!! So why is this risky for you to do? Because if other people start putting out 7g items on the market (Or people who once sold for 10g lower their price to 7g), you probably can't buy ALL of them and then you're the overpriced moron who has way too expensive leather out there. Now you're stuck with tons of leather you can't sell unless you take a loss on all of it. Bad situation to be in. Risk is also found EVERYDAY in the GLOBAL: Trade Chat. You know those morons that spam: WTS [Kroll Blade]. WTS [Large Glimmering Shard], stuff like that. Well why don't you whisper him, and figure out what he's selling that item for. You have the advantage of auctioneer, you know EXACTLY how much certain items sell for, so if he's selling that rare item in the trade chat for 30% less than what that item could go for on the AH, they you can buy it, place in on the AH and make a 30% profit on it. Then again, the reason he could be selling it on the trade chat at 30% less is because he can't get it to sell in the AH for full price. You can see the risk factor here, but with a bit of prediction you can come out with some extra gold in your pockets. Just be smart and use common sense about some of the items that you buy.

Psychology:
Finally, the weirdest part of WoW, you might be asking yourself, "This is a freakin' Video Game you moron, why would you use psychologyin a in video game!!?" Simmer down there Skippy! The answer is on TV!! You know those dumb ads that say "Only 19.99!!!" Ok well the same principles apply to WoW, People tend to look at the first digit they see and work off of that. This means that if they seem the number 49 they see the 4 in the number and just kind of assume that its in the 40's. If you said 50, only 1 number away from 49, they see the 5 and now its a 50's number, a much larger number in their eyes. Thus 19g is only a little more than 11g, BUT 27g is a whole lot more than 19g. Its the same amount difference between the two, but they see that first digit and that number is what gives people the first impression of prices. If you've ever heard the song 3's and 7's by Queens of the Stone Age, they had it half right, your motto for the AH should be 7's and 9's. If someone is selling their item for 10g. Sell your item for 9g.99s. Why? Because what is one silver really? You can kill a monster and get double or more of that. So, you're still making ALMOST the same amount of money as him but attracting A LOT more attention and your price SEEMS LOTS lower than his even though it isn't. Make sense? Good, back to my Queens of the Stone Age advice for placing items up on the AH is that WHEN POSSIBLE (And this may not apply from some oddball priced items that sell for median numbers like 46,25,67, numbers that aren't close to a multiple of ten) try to price the bidding on a 7. This is like 27,37,47,57,17,87, etc. Then place the buy-out on a 9, 49,79,19,99,69, etc. This little tip has increased my profits anywhere from 30%-100%. Its a very very nifty thing to remember.

So there you go, some tips on pricing and selling things in the AH. You may ask, what do I sell? The answer is: Whatever is in demand, seriously, if a certain weapon is selling like wildfire, find the weapon and sell it, if Jewels are selling like tomorrow is Doomsday, sell Jewels, Again, take everything with caution and moderation. Playing the AH and selling things on it is not very hard, but if you don't use patience and common sense, you could end up losing more than you make. There's lots of gold to be made out there! Have fun gold making!