Sunday, October 25, 2009

Business : A (not so) new project

There are quite a few WoW economy blogs out there, some more popular than others. At first, I was reluctant to start one because there are so many bloggers that most things have already been covered. However I do have a few thoughts of my own... at least once in a while, and writing about my progress in a blog seems less boring than just keeping a spreadsheet.
The first thing I wanted to write about is a project I just started - [Netherweave Bags]. No, I don’t mean that I just leveled tailoring and started selling bags, I sold bags on and off since they were introduced in TBC. Netherweave bags are a very easy market: buy cloth when it’s cheap, turn into bags, sell the bags. It’s not a market that would make anyone rich, but it is a steady profit that I doubt will collapse anytime soon. The bag is cheap (20 cloth = 4 bolts +1 Rune Thread = 1 bag). It has 16 slots which makes it the most popular type of bag for anyone starting a new alt.
I had control of the bag market for about 3 weeks on my server a while ago(by control I mean I was the only major seller) but later I gave it up because I found it too annoying:
The bags each take 1 slot
They are slow to cast (about 15 seconds to create a single bags, over 12 minutes to craft just 50 bags)
Constantly checking the AH for cloth to deny others access to cheap cloth.

I finally created a new alt to deal with all these bags. I sent over 1000g to the alt and I won’t touch this alts money for any reason. I decided to buy all the cloth and the rune thread on this alt and send it all to my tailor from there this way I can track all the money easily and deal with a few annoyances this way. I’ll craft about 200 bags at a time without worrying about bag space and saving myself to run to the tailoring vendor for thread.
I’m using a few addons and macros for this alt, and will give credit and links to the authors of each.
Auctioneer for snatching cheap cloth and Beancounter for tracking expenses/sales.
QA2 for quick posting of bags. QA2 posts a lot faster than Auctioneers batch post, especially when it doesn’t have to split stacks.

MoveItems a mini addon created by Zerotorescue from the JMTC forums. It allows you to create a macro that moves whatever items you want from your bags to the mailbox. 
The macro actually does a few things 
It moves the cloth to the mailbox and immediately mails them, all in one button press. In addition it targets the nearest auctioneer. I use this trick to open the Auction interface while staying within range of the mailbox in Stormwind.

This is about all I can say about bags for now, but I will update at least once to report on my progress. There’s a few things I’d like to pay attention to: How many bags I sell a day, my competitors’ behavior and the optimal price among a few.

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