If you have been following my blog, you probably know that I have recently undertaken a strategy of buying out my competitors glyphs that are selling below my own threshold, in order to build to a stack of 20 for each glyph. The results of this buy-out were rather astonishing in both a good and bad way.
In many instances, the glyphs that I purchased below my threshold didn't quite get me to a 20 stack of each glyph. Instead, they brought me back to the point where I could start selling them for profit again - which I did. But this is where it starts to get interesting... because many more of the glyphs that I bought out ended up being re-listed at my fallback price (35g-59g). Over the past three days, though I have found myself undercut by competitors, many of these glyphs that were originally re-listed at my fallback price have stayed close to that price listing. My initial thought about this was "Great!" - and then I realized something.
I'm feeding the baby-goblins.
First, it should be mentioned that I'm an East Coast player on a West Coast server. This means that I don't get the "last laugh" when it comes to re-posting glyphs late at night for the overnight sales. Secondly, there are possibly 2 other big players in the Glyph market, 2-3 small time "crashers", and 3-5 newcomers. The result of my buying out glyphs that were selling below my own threshold only managed to hurt the other big competitors in the market, dishearten / slow down the "crashers", and make glyphs profitable for the baby-goblins.
On an average night, one of the two big competitors will undercut 1/4th to 1/3rd of my glyphs. Most of the time the "crashers" only post a dozen glyphs at prices so-low that it'd be stupid to bother with (67 silver or less) - and so I let them be. On an average morning, this means I will usually cancel & re-list ~400 to 500 glyphs due to being undercut by both big and small competitors. But this morning I woke up, hit the cancel button, and was left with 57 glyphs on the AH and 895 glyphs in my mailbox. 99% of my glyphs were undercut OVERNIGHT!
And then this morning I was struck with an abounding revelation as I began to add it all together: I am the single largest player in the glyph market on my server. I have no idea how this came to happen over these past three weeks, but now I know what I must do. I had hoped that the "crashers" and my other big competitors would run the baby-goblins out of the market after the MMO-Champion fiasco, but alas it seems that I cannot sit idle any longer.
Lesson of the day: Never trust your competition to run out other competitors. It is time I set my threshold to 2x my profit margin, my fallback to 100%, and my undercuts to 25-50 silver.
"I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending"
Revelations 1:7
~ GG
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KevTool Queue (KTQ)
11 years ago
If you're pulling the competitions Glyphs of the AH cheaply, then try buying out the cheap herbs at the same time. This way you get cheap herbs & Glyphs and they have to pay high herb prices to re-stock which eats into any profits they made from your buying their cheap Glyphs
ReplyDeleteThanks for the pointer Telburn :) I probably should have mentioned that this is actually something I'm currently doing.
ReplyDeleteI've created my own light-weight spreadsheet to calculate the cost of making a 1 ink and 2 ink glyph. At the moment I have a pretty set "standard" of the highest I will pay for a given herb, meaning that if my competition is buying herbs at above the price that I am purchasing them at (which they must be, unless they too have a farmer) then they are certainly losing money =)
I think (hope) a week of this will run them out. Though I am selling every glyph at a prophet, and I have several herb farmers supplying me with cheap herbs... so I know for sure that I can out-last these baby-goblins.