Time Is Money: Selling in multiple stack sizes on the auction house
Time Is Money is where the WoW.com editors told Basil to put all his nonsense instead of clogging up their inboxes with thoughts and tips about gold making in World of Warcraft.
Hi folks! Today we'll be talking about something that many experienced auctioneers have discovered on their own-- the stack size you list on the auction house has an effect on your profits and sales volumes. There are many types of things that you'll find yourself selling as you get more involved in making gold on the AH, and most of them are being bought by people who need more than one, but less than a stack.
The buyers for whatever product you're marketing are motivated mostly by price, however also by convenience. If a buyer needs a stack of 3, say, Infinite Dusts, unless you provide them with the choice of buying a stack of three, they need to choose between 3 singles or a stack that would leave them with leftovers. If the prices are the same, they'll typically go for avoiding leftovers. Many will even pay more for singles to they can avoid leftovers. You also have to factor in that many of them use the default AH interface, complete with its horrible sorting, so they may just buy the singles to avoid having to page through to the stack size they want.
How should you use this to make more gold? You can provide the service of pre-packaging your wares in a variety of stack sizes. The skill comes in when you're trying to decide what sizes to offer, how much of each size you should list, and what prices you should use. Here are some rules of thumb:
See if any of the common uses for the product lend itself to a particular stack size. Adamantite Powder, for example, is used by jewelcrafters trying to level their skill in stacks of 4 for Mercurial Adamantite, so you can count on seeing more demand for this particular stack size
Test the waters by posting all sorts of stack sizes and seeing what sells fastest.
Try to price each stack size based on other auctions for the same stack size- even if some guy has a 20 stack of Wild Magic Potions up for sale at 10% under your cost, you will still make sales if you undercut the lowest price for singles with singles and 5 stacks with 5 stacks.
When you list weird stack sizes (generally anything that's not 1, 5, 10, 20, or a number based on a common use), you might want to try increasing your unit price if you have no competition. People buy my infinite dusts at a 30% premium to avoid having leftovers. I don't sell all that many per week, but I still have no competition most nights.
Being an auctioneer is like being able to print money. Or gold, as it were. Wait, that doesn't make sense... you can print on gold, but you can't print gold. That would be closer to transmutation? I can transmute titanium, but that's only worth it if the price of saronite is low enough to justify the time spent making it. I need some sort of analogy here. Whatever, I'll figure it out later. Making gold? periodically, Time Is Money will give you short tips on how to make money.
