Diplomacy on the Auction House

Here's something that I've been doing for about a month now, with great profit.

"I have an engineer character, and as soon as I got the iceblade arrow recipe I wanted to start selling those, because I heard a lot of gold was to be made from those.

On my realm, there were something like 3 or 4 other people regularly selling iceblade arrows, and we all undercut each other, ending up selling them for something like 2g per stack. One day, because I was tired of making such little profit off these, I sent a mail to each of the other major sellers asking for all of us to only post arrows at 4g per stack. This way, we don't undercut the price too low, and buyers will buy our goods equally. They all agreed, so we have all been enjoying a huge bump in the gold we make.

I just wanted to show how diplomacy can really help you make gold.

Peter"

Who says you can't have diplomacy on the auction house haha. Nice story Peter, usually I get emails about people who can't figure out how to deal with when diplomacy fails, so I think I'll answer that here just in case your strategy does not work for other readers. For starters, do you think your iceblade arrows would of sold at 4 gold per stack if you had allowed them to go a full 48 hours without reposting at  a new amount? You'd be surprised how at certain times throughout the day a product like the arrows will completely be bought out on the auction house (such as just before raid time) and so your 4 gold arrows would actually get bought. Many people swear they can't sell items on the auction house but they aren't doing it correctly and allowing demand to take care of the undercuts on their auctions. I'm glad you found a diplomatic solution that works for you however, since you may actually make more gold with your method!

8 comments: on "Diplomacy on the Auction House"

  1. When I was working the flask trade I used the same tactic of posting ABOVE the lowest price. It created an artificial ceiling so that the competition either had to take bare bones prices by force. And nobody likes that even if it was originally by choice.

    Their other choice is to post above me promising me a much greater sales volume at my acceptable price, not theirs. Then the dance begins of lowest and second lowest until somebody gives in.

  2. I would love to do this but some of my markets on my realm have much more than just 4 competitors so I don't think I could pull this off.

    Plus I have a couple competitors who have gotten upset with me and sent me tells because I've bought up all the stock posting in trade channel or beat them in undercutting wars. Just makes me warm and fuzzy inside =]

    <a href="http://blingingwow.blogspot.com>Blinging WoW Gold Blog</a>

  3. I wish this worked, but the most money will be made by the one person who creates an anonymous alt and starts posting arrows for 3.50g, while continuing to post them at 4g on his main. He'll get all the sales, and still enjoy the lack of competition.

  4. I do agree with Euripides, but I also think that you could also be the one to do this :P.

    You would be like those people that post 1 or 100 Arrows at a time for the same price.

  5. In the days Ol' Gevy did his Morons of the week, I would've forwarded a screenshot of the ingame mail to him, allong with a mail in which I mocked this guy.
    But I must admit, I respond better to a nice ask then to threats and name-calling so I might have considered the offer (and the do the Euripides-thing)

  6. Well a different take on this is what happened to me recently.
    I have a Inscription bank alt that supports me and my friends mains (L42-43).
    I do this by selling the low level Minor glyphs (Midnight & Lions Ink).

    I set my price at around the 100% margin (mats cost around 2g and I sell for 3.5-4.5 gold).

    I got a whisper from another seller that my price was too low (they are selling at 24-28 gold) and I should undercut them by 20 silver instead.

    I stuck to my postion though, because I don't need masses of gold at this point. Instead of things degenerating they offered to buy any glyphs that I was going to undercut for 4 gold (max of 2 of each glyph).

    As a result I am sending them around 170 glyphs per week, plus selling the other slow selling glyphs.

    I spend a small amount of time crafting and they still make a large margin on the glyphs they sell.

  7. The difference between this and arrows is that the arrow scam targets buyers, and this hurts another competitor.

    Competitors are fair game- they want your money and you want theirs. Buyers are the shared resource that nobody should be able to burn.

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