Making Gold For Newbies Doesn’t Have To Be Guesswork

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  Um, whatever.  This is a dog eat dog world, and if you’re doing something well it’s only a matter of time before you’re not alone any more.  For more than two years we’ve been teaching people how to Dominate – especially at the auction house.  But from time to time we have to step back (even though the pros gripe at us) and start back at the beginning.

A few days back we brought back an article from back in the day talking about using enchanting for making gold.  Amazingly we get the same old crud from people who think it’s more complicated than that, but disenchanting will always be one of the cornerstones of any good wow gold making business.  But it certainly isn’t the whole story.  Everyone should be using far more than enchanting to make gold and today we’re going to talk about sniffing out the pros in your market and following their lead.  It’s a way to break into the business without getting your feet all that wet.

In the real world marketing sector, there is a lot of follow-the-leader.  Innovation is expensive and very hit or miss.  But a formula that works well tends to work pretty well for lots of things.  We’re working on a technique for the very advanced gold maker, but it takes a ton of gold to do it on a lot of things and it can be risky (or at least it seems to be dangerous – the worst that can actually happen is a break even).  And one of the ways we figured out what the Chinese gold farmers are REALLY doing these days came from price capping.

Price capping is also a pretty advanced technique, and you don’t have to know how to do it to make some gold using it.  It works best if you’re the one in charge, but you can also ride the wave of someone else price capping if you know how to spot it and what to do when you see it.  Below is one example of a price cap.

mageweave cloth world of warcraft wotlk

You see at the top a few stacks of Mageweave at 924% above market price.  This can only be one of two things: somebody made a mistake, or someone is price capping.  Of course, even the price cap might just be ignorance, but let’s give this dude the benefit of the doubt.  Now, in this case the price cap is not going to work.  You can’t move a market of four pages of stacks with four stacks.  The only thing that’s going to happen from this move is maybe a 1% or 2% bump in the overall price of this item.

Here is another example of a price cap done right.  You might recognize the name.  But I also recognize the names above me.  It doesn’t take too long to figure out who is price capping.  When you scan for mats to resell, you’ll start to see the same five to ten names all the time.  As a general rule; those guys are your real competition at the AH, and everyone else is buying them new shoes.  Of course, all pros aren’t going to the hall of fame, and we’ll see why in a second.

northern stew world of warcraft wotlk

This is the way that price capping is supposed to happen.  The difference here, although you can’t see it, is that the majority of the Northern Stew on the AH has been capped which will seriously affect the price.  You can also see another example of someone price capping who doesn’t really know what they are doing.  After being on this particular server for a while I know that Poliea and Tracea are alt bankers for one person – whose main banking toon happens to be Katharinea, not too hard to figure out who that is after a while.  But whoever it is isn’t much competition because she ends up buying all of my price cap markdowns and never price caps hard enough to actually move the market.

But more to the point, when you see something like what is happening above, it means someone is trying to move the market up.  When you see that, it’s a good time to buy out whatever low priced items there are left on the AH that the price-capper has left behind and then resell immediately as prices rise.  In other words, you can buy a little Northern Stew at 1 gold and resell it at 2 gold.  They are pretty sure to sell since almost everything else on the market is 14 gold, if you see what I mean.  Or you can cash in on their price capping push by cooking up some Northern Stew a few stacks at a time and the price-capper will probably buy you out in an effort to corner the market.

The point is that you can tag along behind the big boys and make a pretty good living riding their wake.  The water is smoother and you won’t have to risk very much.  Making a profit from a moving market without having to move the market is pretty shrewd, and just a little Dominating.