Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Enchant Scrolls: Part Two: Fixing the Market

Last time, I wrote about how even though Enchanting has a very good potential for profit, the market was in a very bad shape on most servers. Today I'm going to write about my attempts to fix my own market.
 This post is not a guide. What I did was risky and depending on your own server you risk to lose a lot of money.

Now that we got that out of the way, I'll explain what I did. The short version is this: I bought out everyone under my threshold and set very high fallbacks in hope that someone will undercut me at a decent price. There's a bit more to it then that though.

I'll use a couple scrolls as an example to demonstrate what's going on.

Part One: How Good scrolls turn bad


a few hours later:

If you look closely, you will notice, I was selling Powerful Stats to chest for 330g. Just a few hours later I only get 285g for the same scroll. Obviously, I take a look at what's going on.
A pretty dumb thing to do if you ask me. This person undercut a well selling scroll by 45g. Two more undercuts like this, and the scroll drops below mats cost. But he's using auctioneer, not much I can do. This is why the scroll market is dead on most servers.
The fact that people feel entitled to cheap enchants doesn't help either. This gem is from linking my enchanting to someone in trade chat:
09:12 [Kenson]: how much do u charge for +28 sp on gloves?
09:13 [Zalmoxes]: 20g
09:13 [Kenson]: er...nvm then...
I don't bother linking enchanting in trade. Instead I sell them on AH.

Part Two: How bad Scrolls turn good

I used Chest - Powerful Stats to demonstrate how quickly scrolls go down below mats cost because of deep undercuts and Auctioneer. What eventually happens is people keep listing the scrolls lower and lower, and it doesn't take long until Auctioneer shows a 300g scroll selling for 70g as 'Market Price'.

I'm going to use Tuskar's Vitality as an example of how you make a bad scroll to start selling for profit.
When posting a new batch of scrolls on the AH QA alerts me that Tuskarr's Vitality was Forced to fallback price, meaning that the price fell below threshold.
Doing a quick search reveals the following:
ALL of these scrolls are below mat's cost, so what do I do? I buy them all out, and undercut the next scroll that would give me a profit.
But wait! I come back a few hours later to find that someone is using Auctioneer and thinks my price is way too high:
Cheap scrolls! I buy them out again! This part can get frustrating, with some scrolls, you can keep buying and buying and people will just list more. So I made myself a rule. If I already have 20 of a certain scroll I won't buy them out(Note: 20 of each scroll cost 171k to make...).
Buying out Tuskarr's Vitality proves fruitful however, as next time I log on:
Here are a few other Scrolls I've managed to 'rescue':
Assault to Gloves, and
Assault to boots

You have to keep repeating this buy out- re-list cycle until everyone's Auctioneer starts picking up on the updated prices and raising the market price. This is the reverse of poisoning(I'd appreciate a better link to this).
In the process you'll find out that some scrolls are very worth the effort, while others(Expertise to Gloves for example) are just going to keep piling into your inventory and are therefore not worth it.

In Part three I will talk about What addons I use, how I keep track of scrolls and a few ways to identify the scrolls that sell well and those that do not.
(clicking these images leads to other sites)


3 comments:

  1. I would be interested to see what are your production costs for each of the scrolls and how much profit you're getting at fallback prices. As an enchanter working in trade, the most you get is about 10g from each enchant, so can you really sell scrolls with 100g or more profit?

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  2. I'll make a note to include that in part three.

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  3. If you're actually interested in combating 'poisoning', what you should do is buyout and relist most of the scrolls way above market price. Just leave them there unsold, and put a few down at market price which will be your sellers. The high scrolls are just there to raise the market price for other scanners.

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