I have a few close friend that I give gold to and a few others that I would loan it to if they asked. Everyone else I just put to work instead. My guild knows I make way too much gold and I have shared ideas with lots of them. It is not very often that someone asks me for gold. This weekend someone broke down and asked me for 200g for repairs and something else that I forget.
I didn’t say no. I didn’t even talk about his request. What I did was ask him what his professions are. He was a miner and a black smith. I went to the AH and checked some prices on things. I offered to buy all the eternal earth he had for 7.5G each. He had 17 of them for me. I took a look at the Eternal Belt Buckle market and the mark up was huge. I got some shadows from him, waters off the AH, and smelted several stacks of saronite that I had.
I then tossed him the mats to make 17 Eternal Belt Buckles and tipped him 25G for doing it. I then tossed them all on the AH and sold them for a 5 gold profit each over the weekend. I told him was I was doing and suggested that he do that to make gold.
He didn’t think he had the time to go mine or the gold to buy the mats. I guess its a good thing I never loaned him anything and put him to work instead.
If you are reading my blog you already know of the Greedy Goblin. If you like him or not, he does have some insight on some markets and how to work them. The key is you have to know when to use them, when not to use them, and when to walk away.
When I moved into the netherweave bag market, I was able to use several of his ideas. The supply of netherweave is very strong. It will dry up from time to time, but never for that long. When netherweave is in high supply, then I can produce bags in high supply.
When I check the market, I see a few people with bags up for double the cost of mats. Why, because people pay it. How often is a different story but yes I think they do sell bags for that much. My supply is almost unlimited so I want to sell more faster. So I post at 60-75% of market and that’s exactly what happens. If I see someone post 5-10 bags under me, the I know my price is too high. So I go down another 10-20% and post 10 more.
Those bags sell faster then I ever thought they would. At lower prices, people are buying 4 at a time. Instead of getting one bag to get by for a while, they get all 4 at once. I am still playing with that price point and number to post. But I feel like I am narrowing in on it. I would like to turn this into a 48 hour auction item. I already baby sit several markets more then I should.
At this point you have 2-3 chars that post your glyphs for you. It became too much work to move them into and out of the bank. A few classes of glyphs are dedicated to each alt. You know by color what glyph goes to what character.
Your operation is huge at this points. You feel like you control the herb prices on the AH. They never drop below your buyout price. Your stockpile of ink would last a week without restocking. You craft your glyphs to a full stack when you craft.
Snowfall is a dead item. You produce so much of it that you will never be able to unload it. You do what you can with it but now consider it worthless for your calculations. This brings your cost per ink up and even with a minor adjustment in your threshold you are sill making a profit on the glyphs.
This is the point where you realize that you spend way too much time working inscription. The gold is great and comes in fast, but the time commitment is killing you. You mill it all yourself because nobody can supply you with all the ink you need. You control the market and you know there is no possibly way that your competition can spend as much time as you on it. You outproduce him and you know he cannot keep up.
At this point you are a master of the posting automation and the cancel/post cycle is second nature. You find yourself doing this every chance you get. The profits are starting to flow in and its more then you expected you could make.
You are working directly with suppliers. You have a few farmers either whispering you when you log in or sending you stuff COD. Negotiations have begun with people that make cards. You either buying ink from them or selling snowfall to them.
You primary herbs are adder/lichbloom/icethorn because of the snowfall and you are starting to get a over stock of it. As your production gets bigger at this point you are making more snowfall then you can sell. So you have to start adjusting your ink costs to account, but its no big deal at this point. Glyphs are selling well even with the competition.
You have all of the other posters on your friends list. You find yourself hopping on to post when they log off. You know they just undercut all your auctions. So you have to go correct that.
All those glyphs are starting to be a problem. You have way more then your bags will hold. You have several inscription bags in the bank now and you have to make 2 trips to the AH to post every thing. Your bags fill up often when clearing the mailbox now so you have to shift glyphs to and from the bank bags.
You are a top seller on your server. You sit with 20% of the glyphs on the AH and are building a huge bank roll. More gold is coming in then you know what to do with it.
To make the jump to phase 2, you probably already had it in your mind that it was a profitable professions. Some guide or blog gave you the idea and you had to try it for your self. At this point you are focusing on buying all the books of glyph mastery. Research is something else you are doing daily.
You know the leveling glyphs don’t sell well, but you see potential in the book glyphs. The research glyphs really shine. They are not all that great but the competition is lighter. You make a little bit of everything that you see sells over a set value. You find yourself with all inscription bags to hold all the glyphs you are working. Most of your glyphs get reposted whenever they land in your bags.
Finding herbs at a discount is now a focus. You are making and selling a lot more gyphs then before. If you were buying ink off the ah, you have moved to milling herbs. This is the point where you look at selling snowfall to offset the cost of your ink. You do the math and see that the snowfall makes your ink dirt cheap. You may even shift your focus to the higher quality herbs when you discover this.
If you have any competition, this is where you start to play the undercut game. Every time you hit the AH, you cancel any undercut auctions and repost at a few silver undercut. Posting automation is just starting to work into it for you. Your first night of using an auto poster tippled your profits for the day.
I think I got myself lost in the process as I grew my inscription into the monster that it is now. The system is as automated as I can make it and it take a lot of time. I even wrote a small mod to help out (I’ll have more info on this later). Sweetiebird recently reminded me that 80% of your profits come from 20% of your work. So I need to review what 20% is making me the most gold. Lets see what I can look at.
1) Posting schedule: I repost 4-6 times a day. I need to go back and look at what times of the day I make the most gold. Some of those posts I do are fairly close together. How much more is that 2nd posting going to make me than if I would have just let them sit where they were. Or how much more did that posting make me if I know I will post again soon. One or the other could be doubling my efforts with little return. A few of my postings are at key times of the day. All the others that I slip in when I can are the ones I need to look at.
2) Threshold price: If I increase my threshold then I will not be selling glyphs that fall below that. I will be posting less glyphs but the ones I do sell will have a higher profit margin. The more glyphs I sell the more gold I make. I also have to mill more herbs, sell more snowfall, make more glyphs, and gather more items from the mailbox. So selling the dirt cheap glyphs adds time to the process for each one. My total sales would go down. So would my time spent and it would increase my gold per hour.
3) What glyphs to post: I have been of the school of thought that you post every glyph that you can make. It is a numbers game. The more numbers you have up, the better the numbers work for you. What this does is causes me to use more chars to try and post every glyph. If it does not sell, then it does not add time to the rest of my process. I have several glyphs that I will sell 5-13 of in a day. I also have 120 each day that never sell. At the moment I have glyphs grouped by class when I should group them by how many they sell. Then I could selectively post the ones that sell more often then the ones that don’t.
4) Skip the singles: I recraft every glyph that sells. While I am crafting, I have to shift and move then around as my bag fills up. Once I am done, I have to filter out the ones that go to my alts and dump them in the guild bank. I think I could skip over items that only sold a few. I have stacks of 14 so going into the next day a few short on the ones that don’t sell often will not hurt much. When I do have to craft them, I will be doing more at a time. The detail here is they stack. So if skipping the singles frees up enough bag space to prevent me from running out of bag space while crafting, it would make things go smoother.
5) Craft more at once and less often. The last time I scaled up I just ended up selling more glyphs. What I thought would be a weekly crafting session stayed a nightly one with more to craft. I guess I need to scale up larger and produce more at a time. If I do this, I will produce more of the better sellers. Before I scaled everything up to the same stack size. If I just craft more of the hot items when I do it, I could slip to a every other day crafting sessions at a minimum.
It looks like I have several options in cutting down the amount of work and time I put into it. A few of those have a breaking point where they don’t save much time until I hit that point.
You have just power leveled inscription. Probably ended up farming old world herbs to help or paying way to much for those same herbs on the AH. The cheap ones were in short supply but you managed.
You found several glyphs selling for almost nothing. You almost feel like it’s not worth posting them and are almost temped to vendor them. You did find the DK glyphs to sell fairly well and possibly one or two that sold for 10g-30g. You probably kept up on recrafting the DK glyphs and those special high sellers.
In a matter of days those good glyphs crashed like a rock on you. Every time you post them, someone else undercuts you. Odds are if it was a trainer glyphs, someone dumped 6-10 on the market and it crashes. You curse at them under your breath a little bit but work the glyphs that sell.
You are just getting started. Getting a feel for the market here. If you were doing this on your own, this would probably be the extent of your glyph selling. You may look around and find other good sellers only to see them fall in price as you try to keep them up. If you stay on top of your research, you will find a handful that feel like very few people have and you can turn a profit.
You don’t really know what to do with the snowfall at this point. You probably drop them on the AH and don’t think much about it if you are milling your own herbs. If you didn’t do the math behind it yet, you are trying to buy the cheap herbs or ink off the AH.
If someone is working your market hard, they will probably frustrate you. Many people leave the game at this point claiming there is no gold in inscription. If they only knew how close they were.
I decided to start a series covering my snatchlists. I covered Borean Leather yesterday and decided to keep with the idea. Netherweave Cloth should be on every tailors snatch list. It is such a simple flip to make to turn it into a Netherweave Bag. The math is so simple too. 1 stack of cloth is one bag. Check the prices of those 2 items and if there is a profit jump in.
I snatch it at 7g a stack and sometimes buy more at 7.5G. Add a rune thread and I sell it from 10-11G. I can list several bags at that price and they sell. My competition like to post at 15G but I don’t expect that to last long. My bigest issue is running out of cloth to make bags with. They sell much faster then I can buy the cloth for them.
I know tailoring prabably has some other good markets and I plan to dig into them to see if there are other areas I should be taking advantage of. But this is such a simple flip that I cannot pass it up.
I love to watch Borean Leather on my server. The market floods from time to time and you can catch stacks and stacks of it way under value.
First lets define vender value for Borean Leather. I never vender it, but if my markets crash I can still turn a profit by vendering it. Frostscale Leggings take 12 pieces and vender for 5g35s64c. That works out to 44.6 silver a leather or 8.93g a stack. I see it sell for as low as 30 silver on my server. So daily I purchase all leather under 41 silver. But lets look at the other ways to make gold off of it.
First is to check the conversion to Heavy Borean Leather. That takes 6 leather a piece. At 41 silver anything I sell over 2.58G is profit. I sold several stacks at 4.3G each last night. Thats higher then the norm. 3.5G is more commonly what I sell it at. But thats still a good profit.
Heavy Borean Armor Kit is another item that sells well for me. It takes 4 heavy leather (24 borean leather) at a cost of 9.8G and sells for 15G or more.
And an item I mentioned previously is Dark Iceborne Leggings. It takes 4 heavy leather (24 borean leather) and 1/2 an eternal shadow at a cost of 11.3G and sells for 15G or more as a Dream Shard.
With these three options I can buy every piece of borean leather that I see and know that I have several channels to push it onto the market. If I keep buying up all the supply, then it also prevents anyone from moving into those markets. This is one item on my daily snatch list.
