30 April 2017 Gold on hand before distribution: 80,957 Items on the Auction House: 296 It was another profitable two weeks with almost all gold coming from sales of items carried forward from the prior months. I only made a couple purchases the last 14 days because I haven’t been at work since the 12th of April and that’s where I make most of my buys. You can see the effect of this by looking at the drop in the number of items for sale on the AH, which fell from 366 to 296. These past few months have provided some interesting data to look at in terms of sales over time and inventory levels. With this data we can make a few predictions about the future. Disclaimer: As with most investments “past performance is no guarantee of future results.” Before we can take a realistic look at past sales and inventory levels we need to consider some of the “outliers” or items that are outside the normal range of all the other data. These outliers would be those few items that I was lucky to buy on the AH for a few gold and even luckier to sell for many thousands of gold in profits. I don’t want to include this data because it’s unrealistic to believe this will happen again on a regular basis so I will eliminate the profits from the “Gold Fish” and “The 1 Ring” in my calculations. Warning, here comes the math. Let’s look at all the data: Just kidding, I won’t bore you will all that. I’ll summarize my findings instead. As my inventory of items on the AH has increased each two weeks, so has my profits because I am, in turn, selling more items. Over the last two months my average inventory of items for sale on the AH has been around 250 items and the average profit per item of inventory has been about 230 gold, or about 57,500 gold every two weeks. This being the case, I am going to try to maintain average of at least 300 items for sale on the AH for the next 14 days. If all holds true we should expected to see a profit of somewhere close to 69,000 gold for mid-month May. I will include future profit predictions from now on, in this bi-monthly blog, based on sales and inventory level from prior periods, just for fun.
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14 April 2017
Gold on hand before distribution: 77,786 Items on the Auction House: 361 Shortly after my last blog entry someone decided they wanted “The 1 Ring” for their collection, resulting in profit of 15,688 gold. A pleasant surprise indeed. On another interesting note, I managed to sell two “Fiery Beholder Eyes” over the last two weeks for a profit of 26,585 gold. I got them for 10 gold each from the same seller at the same time. My thought is that he or she must have been trying to sell them, unsuccessfully, for a long time and finally gave up. I’m glad they gave up because I was able to turn 20 gold into over 26,500 gold during this period. The decision about whether or not to buy those items and try to flip them was an easy one. Just as with “The 1 Ring”, they were very low cost with high profit potential (if they sell). Unfortunately, this happens few and far between so the majority of the time spent deciding what to buy, and what to avoid, depends on a number of considerations. The primary goal of these considerations of course is to make as much gold as possible with the least amount of gold invested. I follow a specific set of “rules” when deciding what to buy and although there may be better ways to go about this, what I have been doing has proven to be profitable. This project was started with an investment of only 500 gold and to date has produced over 140,000 gold in profit, and an inventory of over 360 items currently on the AH. The websites and add-ons I have mentioned before provide lists of items for sale on the AH and I primarily only buy items that are posted at 5% or below of their current market value. There are a number situations in which I won’t buy something even though it’s 5% or less. I usually don’t buy something if there are more than 3 of that item already for sale on the AH. I seldom buy wrists, head, shoulder, and back gear items, and I never purchase player crafted items or vendor items. Those are some of my basic “rules” and I’ll provide some more details and examples in the weeks to come. Flipping items on the AH is a hit and miss way to make gold. Unlike selling trade goods, mats and crafted items, which sell in large quantities every day, transmog gear, recipes, and other unique items likes these are notoriously slow to sell, if they sell at all. For example “The 1 Ring” is a level 15 item that adds +1 to all stats. This would normally not be a valuable item, but because of its name, which is a reference to J. R. R. Tolkien’s Book “Lord of the Rings”, it sells on average for over 16,000 Gold. “Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky, Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone, Nine for the Mortal Men doomed to die, One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne In the land of Mordor where the Shadows lie. One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them In the land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.” I was lucky to find one on the AH for 49 Gold; the individual who put it up for sale didn’t know its true worth and I snatched it up. Collector’s items like these including rare recipes, plans, and items no longer available in game, have high values but terrible sales rates. My decision for buying items like this is based solely on this consideration: I may never be able to re-sell (flip) this item for what it’s worth; I might not even be able to re-sell it for what I bought it for. I’m I willing lose all the gold I am about to spend to purchase this item because I may never be able to re-sell it? In this instance I don’t mind losing 49 gold for the chance to make close to 16,000 gold. If, however, this ring would have been listed for 2,000 gold, I would not have bought it. I can do a lot on the AH with 2,000 gold and would hate to throw that much gold away buying something I may never sell. As I expected, I have been re-posting “The 1 Ring” on the AH every two days for over a month and no bites. I am not missing the 49 gold I paid for it, but I would have definitely been missing the profits that 2,000 gold would have made on the AH, if I would have spent that much for the ring. |
AuthorRetired Army NCO, Logistics Manager, and Habitual World of Warcraft Player. Archives
April 2017
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