Tuesday, October 6, 2009

The Book of Revelations

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

2 comments:

  1. 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

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for the pointer Telburn :) I probably should have mentioned that this is actually something I'm currently doing.

    I'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.

    ReplyDelete