Taking Advantage Of Low Cost Materials

Hickson This post originally appeared in my newsletter. Subscribe now to get these Auction House tips before they are published on the blog.

The World of Warcraft economy is closely modeling the current real-world economy ever since the release of the 3.1 patch. Everything is in the tank.

It appears that everyone and their brother was hoarding and stockpiling materials in high hopes of an increase in demand. Unfortunately, all those people have managed to do is flood the market and drive down prices across the board.

My goal now is to try and use this all to my advantage to grow my gold supply. But first I needed a bit more than the 50 gold I had. I scanned the Auction House for poorly priced gems. This is a nice technique to try when you’re looking for something to buy low and sell high. I ended up buying a Jagged Forest Emerald for 10 gold and a Swift Skyfire Diamond for 11 gold. They both sold, after a re-listed them, for 37 gold and 30 gold respectively.

Now that I had some more gold I was able to try and turn the low cost materials situation in my favor.

Taking Advantage of the Down Market

It’s been a long time since crafted items by high-level Blacksmiths, Tailors and other professions were worth the effort to build and sell. As demand for these items shrunk and the cost of the materials to make them settled it became pretty obvious that the profit margins for these high level Bind on Equip pieces of gear wasn’t worth the time.

Well, now that material prices are bottoming out it’s time to revisit the idea of these high level profession items. I did some light browsing on my server’s Auction House and decided that I had enough gold built up that I should get in on the game of selling Eternal Belt Buckles. There’s also some money to be made in Tailoring with the various types of cloth but on my server the current margins are too small.

I was able to consistently by the materials for the Eternal Belt Buckle on the Auction House for well below the average buyout price of 70 gold on the finished item. That meant I could buy 4 Saronite Bars, 1 Eternal Earth, 1 Eternal Water and 1 Eternal Shadow for about 35 gold. I would then find a Blacksmith to build the Buckle for me after I gave him a 10 gold tip per Buckle. That means I was spending 45 gold to make 70 gold.

Since I’m trying to do this all on my own, without the help of friends, my costs are a bit higher. If you have a guildie or friend who can make the Eternal Belt Buckle for you then your margin of profit will be much better. If you have a high level miner of your own you can make a real killing here. The time it takes to gather the materials for a Buckle can be trivial.

For the next day or so I kept buying low cost materials, tipping Blacksmiths and selling Belt Buckles for around 65/70g. The price slowly dipped and crashed to about 50/55g after someone on my server posted fourteen Buckles at once, effectively killing the market for at least 48 hours.

The Final Result

After a few days of selling Buckles (and keeping on top of my companion pet strategy from last issue), I managed to increase my gold count to 443 from the 50 gold I started with after my last email.

The Lesson

In this terrible WoW economy, where everyone is rushing to liquidate their stockpile of items, there are opportunities to combine those discounted goods and convert them into a high priced item with high demand. All it takes is a bit of research and math to find out what you can make the cheapest before turning around and selling the finish product for a decent profit.

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