Archived from groups: alt.games.warcraft (
More info?)
"Mike Kohary" <sorry@no.spam> wrote in message
news:d5c20i$eag$0@pita.alt.net...
> Jack Hollis wrote:
> >
> > Another time saver is to make an auction mule. I have a lvl 2 player
> > who never goes anywhere other than the Bank, Mailbox and AH in
> > Ironforge.
>
> Awesome idea; thanks for a great tip!
>
A few more tips.
1) There is no good reason not to use 24 hour auctions exclusively.
Assuming your item sells, you pay commission on a percentage of the final sale
price. If the commission is lower than the deposit amount, you will get a
refund of the unspent deposit included with the sale money.
The only time the higher deposit on 24 hour auctions hurts you is if the item
is returned with zero bids.
2) Keep in mind who your customer is going to be. When selling tradeskill
components, *always* set a reasonable buyout price. 99.9 percent of my
tradeskill purchases have been buyouts. If I'm buying cloth, leather or a
certain type of ore, I'm buying it because I need it now, not 8 to 24 hours
from now. If I have to wait several hours to get the component, it becomes
faster to go mine it myself. And if you're not selling convenience... then
what the hell are people paying you all that extra money for in ore prices?
Tradeskill Auctions without a buyout get completely skipped by me, unless
they're down to "short" time remaining or lower... no matter how low the price
is.
Similarly, the majority of purchasers of low level magic gear are people
outfitting their alts. Set a buyout. People will pay a bit extra to get the
item for their twink *now*. The only ones that won't are the true newbies...
who generally haven't even located Ironforge, and even if they have, they
won't have enough cash to bid higher than what your buyout would have been.
3) If you're competing with other sellers based on buyout price... do not
make the mistake of ignoring the initial bid window. Set the opening bid
equal to your buyout price or slightly below it.
Example - As an engineer, I've recently been selling accurate scopes in the
auction house. Permanent +3 to ranged weapon damage. I've been selling them
for 1g 60s, and I've never had one returned unsold after a 24 hour period.
When I went to put one up for sale yesterday, I noticed someone else had
created a batch and was selling them. 1g70s buyout... initial bid, 50s, down
to medium time. So I bid 50s on each one and bought all three. Over the
next two days I'm going to sell them back for 1g60s each.
Similarly, I've seen 14 slot tailored bags on sale in the auction house...
sell for 3- 4 gold, or something like that. (I forget exactly)... as in
there will be 40 of them for sale, all with buyouts in that range. But one
particular group of 10 of those bags, all made by the one player, had a 4 gold
buyout... and an 80s opening bid. If I had the bank space to sell them
slowly, I bet an 'opening bid only' would have bought at least half of them.
Then I could have sold them back, and even undercutting every seller, made a
hefty profit on each bag.
4) If you are selling a big ticket item without a buyout... time beginning
your auction so that it ends at around 9 pm local time for the server.
Auctions with no buyout don't really begin to see action until the time
remaining changes to medium, or better yet short. When it still says long,
most people figure "why bid, someone else will just take it from me and make
me keep running back to bid again." You want that high activity period to
hit at prime time when 10,000 players are logged into the server, rather than
4 am, when only 2000 players are still playing.
All I can think of for the moment, although I'm sure there's more.
--
Davian / Dearic (Bloodhoof)
"We need a new Mario game, where you rescue the princess in the first ten
minutes, and for the rest of the game you try and push down that sick feeling
in your stomach that she's "damaged goods"... When Peach asks you, in the
quiet of her mushroom castle bedroom "do you still love me?" you pretend to be
asleep. You press the A button rhythmically, to control your breath, keep it
even." - Joey Comeau on increased realism in gaming.
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