Friday, April 16, 2010

I can't pay for repairs!

I just cringe when I see people talking about being broke in chat. The way the economy in WoW is now, there is no need to be broke.

I am known in my guild to be an AH whore and people come to me when they need to make some money. I will tell you the same thing I tell them all. Use your professions to sell stuff on the AH.

There are 2 hard and fast rules about making money in WoW.
1.Know your costs.
2.Never underestimate the ability of the average person to buy something that is of absolutely no use to them.

Lets examine those rules.
Rule 1 is all about the old adage: you make money when you buy not when you sell. Every profession has items that someone wants. The trick is buying the mats for less than what the finished product sells for.

The easiest way to make sure you are doing this is to set up a spreadsheet. Wowstability.com has many fan made ones ready to go and free to download. All you need is a spot to input the cost of each material and a spot to input the sale price of the finished item. Add a 5% loss to the AH for their cut and you should know what your profits are.

Rule 2 is about the fact that you will never know what sells well until you make some and post them. They could make a glyph that makes your character die every time you cast a heal, or a gem that disenchants your gear upon socketing and people would still buy it. As long as you can sell it for more than the cost of the materials you should be making it.

One note here. You may have noticed I said mats that you have bought not mats you have farmed.

YOU SHOULD NEVER FARM FOR MATS

and rarely ever farm for sales. Mats you farm are not free. They cost you the time you spent farming. Would you rather spend 3 hours farming 100g worth of mats or spend 10 minutes buying the mats that would make you 100g in profits? The other 2 hours 50 minutes you freed up can be used to raid or run a dungeon or, god forbid, log off and clean the house.

I firmly believe that to make lots of gold in WoW you should have two max level crafting professions. The state of the game makes a farming profession the easiest way to get some gold in your hands. I pick a flower or chip a rock and I get 20 silver. For those of us who look beyond to what that flower or rock can be turned into, that same rock is worth 6 gold. The only difference between you getting 20 silver and me getting 6 gold for that rock is the work I put into it.

It is the old adage of work smarter not harder. The reason that most people don't do this is because it takes a lot of time and effort to find the profitable items in each profession. You have to work hard to make sure you know what a fair* market price is. Once that is done you have to understand what the normal costs of each material to make the item is. When you have this information and it comes out that the finished product is worth more than the materials you have to try and sell it. Do people want it? How many can you sell in a week? It can take weeks to do this whole process. By understanding the process and following it, you can turn that 20 silver rock into a 6 gold rock. If you don't want to work that hard, by all means go mining or herbing and I will buy that rock from you and smile all the way to the gold cap.


*(fair market price is defined as: the price at which the item will sell on a consistent basis.) It doesn't matter what you think it is worth, It only matters what the people will buy it for time and time again

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