Doin it rong!Follow

So here's the situation...

My Warrior is Inscription/Enchanting. I've been making a lot of money selling glyphs while leveling. Nothing incredible or amazing, but by level 79 I'm at 56k earned, with about 50k of that coming from glyphs and darkmoon cards. Not too shabby I thought.

One of the things I've done is to sell my glyphs rather cheaply, for my server at least. I don't price them over 31g/each. It's fine by my reasoning, since I never have to pay more than about 10g for the mats to make a gylph, and most of the time costs are in the 5g range. However, in contrast it's not unusual to see glyphs up on the AH in the 200g-500g range. I imagine they do sell some, but they're also under cut a lot.

Now, to spice things up I recently got this in-game mail from one of the '200g-500g' people.



Being the non-confrontational type I simply deleted it from my inbox and moved on. I'm happy with the way things are going, and don't really intend to change atm. However it got me thinking. What would you all do in a similar situation?



Any other ideas? A less wimpy response perhaps? What are your thoughts?

Share please.




Edited, Sep 25th 2011 6:08pm by someproteinguy

I'd probably message him back, but I'm a bit of a troll.

The ceiling for where I sell glyphs is around 100g, but then it costs up to 20g per on my server, and I haven't found a good add-on since glypher quit working. If 200g is really a good selling point for glyphs, he can always buy all your stock and re-list them.

I read that as one of two things: Either a helpful tip rather than an actual complaint (Hey, it happens. Sometimes. Maybe. Possibly. Occasionally. Rarely.), or trying to trick you into raising your prices so he would be undercut by less and stand more of a competition.

I'd probably say keep them about where they are. If you can get the mats for 10g, there's nothing stopping him from getting them for the same and pricing them for lower than you.

I would double your selling price but not go much higher. People who expect 200g+ for a glyph are bat crazy (except if they are brand new glyphs which I can understand). That's what I did back when I was still playing.

Plus with that long of a winded letter you got from the person I imagine all they are looking for in a person is someone who will listen so bottoms up.

That's commie thinking!! :)

You all should keep the prices as high as the market will allow. I believe in capitalism, but I do try to keep things reasonably fair. I don't believe in buying everything up and reselling at higher prices. That is gouging.

Do whatever you want. The trick to making money in this game is to do what nobody else is doing. Once everybody is doing what you're doing then it's time to move on to the next thing, full circle.

I'll sell what I want for how much I want. If someone selling higher doesn't like it they can buy me out and relist at their ridiculous prices. Of course I'll also turn around and put up ridiculous prices on items. Why? Because if some poor sap is willing to pay then I say go for it.

I would probably raise the price slightly for a better margin. But I would go the troll route before that. But that's me, I can't help it. I'd have to get a rise out of them.

That's your response to everything.

Better be careful, you're gonna end up meme-ified like Bear Grylls.

First off, do what you're comfortable with. If you're happy selling at your current price don't let someone convince you to raise your price just because they want a fatter profit margin.

What I voted for however was to raise your price. I'm not saying you need to sell for 200g+, but if you can keep regularly selling certain glyphs at a higher price why not? If someone wants cheap glyphs they can level it themselves or get the mats and look for a crafted who will do it for a smaller fee. You might as well enjoy it while the market is good.

Not Pigtails from her reply here. The other three, yeah.

Those of you mourning the loss of Glypher should check out TradeSkillMaster. I make the majority of my money on gems and there's one person on my server who I've wanted to send a similar letter to. They consistently post gems for 50-75% below everyone else. I just buy them and relist for a higher price. That way they get what they want for them and I make a profit. Managed to hit gold cap this weekend, so that's proof that many people will indeed pay high prices for stuff they want.

Edited, Sep 26th 2011 8:05am by Tellaria

I'd ignore the mail and do whatever I wanted. The auction house is a solo activity and you have no obligation to please others if you're happy with your system. Sure, we all get annoyed with our fellow auctioners from time to time, but it's not Joe Scribe's irritation with you that's the issue, it's his response to that irritation, which despite being politely worded is obnoxious and pointless. He doesn't get to decide that he's his server's resident economic expert and appoint himself regulator. He'd get better results by adapting to market conditions rather than trying to control them.

For the things I sell, I have certain price ranges in mind that I consider reasonable. While I will bring my prices up at times, there is always a point that I just feel 'wrong' going beyond so often I will undercut the gougers by a lot. I don't usually sell regularly or in the bulk that scribes and jewelcrafters deal in so it doesn't bother me to undercut a lot just to get the stuff out of my inventory.

People gouging on glyphs bother me a lot because I do have alts on the other faction and on other servers where I don't have access to 'free' glyphs (I have a scribe on my main server and a good friend with even more recipes than I have too). I have low level characters that have either no glyphs or really suboptimal ones simply because I can't afford to spend over 50g on a glyph no matter how much I want it. While I do know how to make gold if I need it, I don't play those characters often enough to farm stuff to sell so I just go without when it comes to glyphs. It's frustrating to see only a couple of sellers and the prices all super high so whenever I'm in the position to sell things that lowbies (and newbies especially) need, I try to keep the prices reasonable.


The bag market (of all things) has gone weird lately on my server. Small bags will disappear for days and the prices on the 14-16 slot ones have climbed up to relatively high levels. While the price and availability of the largest bags has remained relatively stable, the 16 slot Netherweave ones have climbed to 20g at times when a year ago, I couldn't barely sell them for cost (about 8g was my low limit). Since I have been farming BC dungeons for gear a lot lately, I have accumulated a huge amount of Netherweave so I took my tailor and started selling about 10 Netherweave bags a day for 12g each. It has made me a lot of gold over the past couple of weeks which is really nice and by looking at the buyers, it doesn't seem like the same person has been buying them up to resell them (which wouldn't really bother me anyways). So, while I am taking advantage of the odd market conditions to make gold for myself, I am hopefully helping out people who just need a few bags for a new alt. I also dug into my stash of Runecloth to have my lowbie tailor make those bags (with skillups yay!) to sell as well.




One thing I would suggest is moving the glyphs to a bank alt to sell (if you don't do that already). While I don't mind getting a few people mad at me, I would prefer they not know who the 'real' characters (or guild) they are dealing with are. While I do my bag market stuff on my tailor, she is not a main character by any means so grudges against her don't affect me at all but I probably should start sending the bags to sell off to one of my bank alts instead.

I think it's great that you have been sticking to prices that you feel are reasonable to charge. I think you really do make more gold by selling things at a price that most people can afford especially if the people buying your stuff are trying to resell it at prices that many people will refuse to pay. I have never been desperate enough to pay more than 100g for a glyph (assuming I can even afford it on some of my other server alts). Some people say that people will pay artificially high prices if there are no low prices items but they are wrong. Many people will just go without on an item or will go farm it themselves rather than pay a ridiculous price for something. If you can only find one buyer in a week who will pay 200g for a glyph then you made 200g (minus listing fees for unsold ones) but if you find 10 buyers who will buy that glyph for 30g and end up with none unsold, you have made 300g.