Journeyman Training

How to Reset Auction House Prices

How to Reset Auction House Prices

A strategy that I have used for a long time that has shown solid success involves tactics that will or can rest the pricing of an item.  This is tricky to learn how to do, but once you learn how to do it right, it can make you boat loads of profits!

Concept: By buying out all items, you have a short window with no competition and the ability to set the price you want for that item, basically you are resetting the price point.

Example: Eternal Fire is a drop from WOTLK that is not in high supply in the market right now so people are willing to spend more to buy them to level up their profession or use for crafting items for their alts.  During WOTLK, these would generally sell for between 15g and 30g each, depending on the supply and demand at the time.  Today, I see people listing a few here and there for the same price levels.  Their mistake, my profit.

During WOTLK, these prices were based on large supplies coming to the AH daily since it was a current drop item.  Today, these come to the market sparingly from either people leveling an alt, people farming or folks clearing out their banks.  They use the same pricing but instead of there being a few hundred of these posted in the AH, there may only be 1 to 10.  This gives you the perfect opportunity to reset the market and make some great profits.

I find them listed these days for about 10-20 gold each, and usually there are no more than 10 to 20 in the Auction House to purchase.  I buy all of them and then set my new price, usually around 75g each.  I came up with this number through understanding what people are willing to spend and by doing research through Undermine Journal and other resources to see server averages etc.

The beauty of this method and this item in combination is that there is little competition and great markup potential.  If I buy them for 10g and sell them for 75g then I am making 650% profits!  It may take a day or two but they will sell.  They key is looking at the postings once a day (or more if you can) to see what your competitors list.  I cannot believe how often I find someone posting them for the same 10-25 gold each even though mine are listed for 75g.  Buy them and keep listing them.  In the case where someone decides they want to list theirs right under yours, simply cancel and undercut them.  You have tons of room to negotiate down and make tons of profit.

They key to resetting prices is picking the right item at the right time.  You will have little success in resetting the price on an item like Embersilk Cloth because once you do, people will see the price and list their stockpiles of cloth under you.  The market will suddenly explode with Embersilk cloth and within a few hours the price is back to where ti was and you have not sold any.  Why is this the case?  Because Embersilk is common, it is a current drop from all current zones and raids and is plenty of supply.

Biggest mistakes to avoid:  Over pricing an item so no one buys it.  Buying out the Eternal Fire and then listing it for 1,000g will not net you any buyers and will only inflame people on the server.  Picking an item in high supply will only get you a few minutes or a few hours of profits and may leave you sitting on tons of supply. 

Owning the market or does the market own you?

One of the biggest mistakes I see from people who think that making gold in the AH is only about buying low and selling high.  They read somewhere that you have to “own” the market by buying it all out and then controlling the prices which means you can charge high prices and people have to buy them from you.  So, they go and scan the market and come across something like Wool Cloth and see that there are maybe 30 stacks of it in the Auction House all selling for less than 5 gold per stack.  They buy it all.  They then go back and list it all for 100 gold per stack and wait for their gold to roll in.

And they wait.

The gold never comes.

They go back and look in the Auction House and find that there are now over 100 stacks of Wool Cloth selling for as little as 2 gold per stack.  So they buy it all.  Now they have over 130 stacks of this stuff listed and they keep looking for those sales to roll in, but nothing happens.  They go back to the Auction House and see another 50 stacks listed and they buy it all again.  Someone keeps listing it as fast they can buy it, the prices edges up over time but never gets to the price point that this seller is hoping to get.

What happened?  The premise was faulty to begin with because they cannot control the supply of most items in the game.  The biggest issue here is supply.  You cannot own or control a market that has an infinite supply generated in the game.  In the example of the Wool Cloth, it failed because there is no end to the supply of Wool Cloth as long as someone is willing to go farm it, pull it out of their banks, or is leveling a toon and getting it as drops.  Since a server has tens of thousands of people on them, the odds are against you having a situation where no Wool Cloth exists except for what you have listed.

People will pay higher prices but they will not pay ridiculous prices so the experiment fails and they end up getting stuck with stacks of materials, get frustrated and dump the items into the AH for a loss and tell everyone that you cannot make money in the AH.  If you do this method then you will lose gold and miss the opportunity.

Even in the rare cases where you are able to get this type of method to work, you will take huge losses most of the time which would offset any one time gains.

I will share how to use market leverage and timing to buy low and sell high in a future article, meanwhile don’t make the mistake like so many others and think that you can control a market and make thousands.  You will only end up making me thousands of gold!