undercut
Latest
Gold Capped: How much should you undercut?
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house. Email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail! This week's community post is the most recent recording of the weekly JMTC's meeting, and I'll be there next week answering questions. This isn't the first time I've written about undercutting, and it won't be the last. The burning question of how much to undercut is something that just keeps coming up, not unlike the question of which pet is the best for the DPS. If you ask people who don't sell on the AH, they'll give you a blank stare and make some comment about having a guildie craft it. If you ask an auctioneer with less than 100k, they'll say to never undercut more than a copper. To properly answer this question, we need to try and understand the effect that undercutting has on the market you're in.
Gold Capped: Why deep undercutting on the auction house works
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. For Gold Capped's inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in here every Thursday, and email Basil with your comments, questions or hate mail! This week's gold blogosphere post is Cold's post on Cataclysm profitable commodities. In a thread in the comments on my last article in which I had advised a reader to undercut his glyph competition heavily instead of camping the auction house, I got another comment that got me thinking about pricing. It basically stated that every time the commenter undercut heavily on glyphs, he would immediately get re-undercut by a few copper unless his price was down to the point of no profit. I've written a little about the topic of pricing and undercutting before, but I felt it was time for a refresher. I'm going to start off by quoting what I wrote last March: "If everyone is knocking a copper off the next highest auction, they only way to undercut successfully is to try camp the AH and make sure you're always the competitor who has visited most recently. Needless to say, this is a colossal waste of your time." This is as true now as it was then.
Gold Capped: Selling with Auctioneer's Appraiser
Want to get Gold Capped? This column will show you how, and is written by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, also of outdps.com, the hunting party podcast, and the call to auction podcast. Auctioneer is a wonderful addon I've mentioned a few times already, and today we're going to talk about how to use it to sell your goods efficiently. First up, go download and install it. Now, when you open the auction house, you will see a different interface. We'll be going over a bunch of other useful functionality this has in another post, but today, we're focusing on selling. Do a quick scan by clicking on the fast forward arrow: You should make a point of scanning the AH this way as often as possible, but generally not more than a few times a day. I do it every two days, or whenever I need the data. This allows auctioneer to learn what items are worth in your economy, by keeping track of the listing price over time.
Sprint gearing up to offer $60 / month unlimited calling plan?
After yesterday's barrage of unlimited calling plans left us all terribly underwhelmed, it seems as if Sprint is hoping to emerge as the knight in shining armor by undercutting the oh-so-popular $99 price point. According to unspecified "analysts," the carrier is gearing up to "offer flat-rate calling plans at up to a 40-percent discount to its rivals," meaning that yappers could talk 'til their batteries died (and then some) for around $60 a month. Of course, Sprint has yet to confirm nor deny the reports, but we're all for a price war in the cellular space, regardless.
Vizio readies its sub-$2000 47-inch 1080p LCD TV
Ah Vizio, at it again with the low-cost offerings (which Sony doesn't appreciate very much). While we're sure more than a few folks are kicking back and gazing at their recently-purchased $1,000 42-inch PDP, the firm has divulged that come next February, we can all expect a 47-inch LCD HDTV to hit Sam's Club, Costco, and potentially other big box retailers for "less than $2,000." Oh, and it sports 1080p, too. The firm's CEO declared that current 1080p sets in the $3,000+ range simply "aren't affordable," and is hoping the Super Bowl rush to pick up an HDTV before the big game will boost sales of its undercutting set. An analyst noted that Vizio's offerings didn't "have all the extra features" that other manufactures typically include, and that it didn't feature "the best picture quality," but admitted that it was a bargain and "a good value" nonetheless. So if you know that aging set will need replacing come Super Bowl Sunday, and you've only got about two large to throw down, Vizio should be able to fit the bill quite nicely.
Softbank to undercut rivals, offer most mobiles free of charge
Softbank -- the folks who could be (but probably aren't) in cahoots with Apple -- is pulling out all the stops to lure customers away from those larger carriers in Japan. Soon after "vowing" to undercut any prices offered by rival firms NTT DoCoMo and KDDI, the little guy has now gone one step further by offering free handsets at the point of sale. Of course, there's always a catch, and customers looking at high-end phones will be faced with "a monthly fee" for the luxury of toting the latest and greatest, and will also be forced to sign a "one or two year" contract. But before you get too down on your luck, Softbank estimated that a "digital TV phone" would only run customers about ¥390 ($3.30) per month, which seems awfully cheap when Verizon somehow charges even more to automatically restore your contact list.
Rumor: 360 wireless gaming receiver $20; wheel $130; headset $60; camera $40; Halo and Forza faceplates $20 [update 1]
Thanks to a reliable source from Microsoft, we've learned some important details about the new peripherals announced for the Xbox 360, including pricing and a few Halo faceplate (non)specifics. Check out the leaked info and prices below: 360 wireless gaming receiver (which enables wireless 360 controllers, headsets, and wheels on your PC): $20 Wireless racing wheel: $130 Wireless headset: $60 Xbox Live Vision Camera (with headset, one month of Live Gold, and one arcade -- presumably Xbox Live Arcade -- game): $40 New faceplates for Halo (with the Master Chief on 'em, but not Halo 3 specific) and Forza (no word on connections to the sequel): $20 each 256 MB portable memory unit (MU): no official price yet, but definitely not four times the cost of the older 64MB MU Besides acknowledging that the PC is "the biggest gaming device of all," MS appears to be setting an agressive price for its most relevant new PC accessory, the wireless gaming receiver (at least in comparison to the outrageously priced 360 wireless networking adapter). Unfortunately, no price was revealed as of yet for the USB-based HD-DVD add-on.We've speculated in our recent podcasts as to what would happen to the various 360 SKUs when price drops inevitably occur. An interesting theory bandied about by prolific Joystiq Contributor epobirs (on our earlier bump-to-256MB-MU post) was that a $20 price drop for the Core system, coupled with a $20 price drop on the 64MB MU, would finally allow folks to pick up a capable non-Premium bundle for the original $300 Core price point. (Not a bad way to undercut PS2 memory card prices, too.) We hope to get official confirmation on this info in the not-too-distant future.[Update: Sorry, had the camera price wrong in the headline; it now matches the price of the bundle listed in the body of the text below.]See also: 360's Mem Unit getting a bump to 256MB? (Comment from epobirs) Use 360 wireless peripherals with a PC Engadget & Joystiq's live coverage of Microsoft's Xbox 360 E3 event Joystiq / Engadget podcasts from Day One and Day Two of E3 2006
