Undercuting prices in AH

[Deleted]

People rarely setup AH addons is my guess. And most of them have ~5% undercut as a base. My own has 1 copper because I set it this way.

Because it doesn't work. Unless there's very few of said item available at a time undercutting by 1 copper means that i'd have to check my auctions constantly which i don't want to do. Try undercutting by 1c on a fast moving market and then see if any of your items sell. In order for that to have a good chance of working you also need to know when items sell or not. If it's a Tuesday and i post Potions of Prolonged power i'll probably not undercut the lowest because the price is at one of the lowest points during the week. In order to reliably sell those for good profit i need to know the price per week day and how it moves between that, the ~amount of items sold so that i can put them up at a reasonable price i.e. if i'm reasonably sure that 3k pots will sell in the next couple of hours i can put mine just below the price of item #2k to account for extra listings.

The above applies for more or less anything where the items aren't extremely scarce i.e. rare transmog items. On slower moving items i.e. obliterum undercutting by 1 copper will only fuck you over if you don't know how the prices move throughout the week(as slight as that is) as well as the current price trend for obliterum overall. Undercutting by 1 copper doesn't achieve that much. You get slightly more profit at the risk of your auctions not selling unless you know what you're doing. Surprisingly a lot of people aren't interested in price trends for items, price variance during the week, etc. so undercutting by 5% is a good start point that guarantees you that your items will sell if they're around the actual market price.

[Deleted]

As someone who might undercut more than 1 copper / 1% from time to time, here are my thoughts:

I dont care about profit as I have enough gold from sell runs (archi etc). I just want the item to be gone, could also vendor it, but maybe someone else could use it. So why not put it on the AH with a price so that someone will definitely buy it?

At the same time some of you might say "oh you are destroying the prices and I cant earn much anymore". Well you are not earning the gold out of nothing, you are taking it from someone else. May it be with a justified price or not, I dont see why I would have to protect your profit.

[kamuimac]

i remeber situation like this close to launch of legion - i was liquidating my herbs/ores i got from garrisons puting stacks 100-150 gold cheaper then stacks that were on ah - and guess what i got exackly the outcome i wanted - clean bank tabs in 1 night - but i still made buttload of gold since i had lieteraly hundreds of thousands of crafting mats - all pushed in under 12 hours - win win for me - i cleaned my banks and made profit for mats that didnt cost me anything due to passive resource generation of garrisons.

someone coudl say - but you could have made coupel of hundred thousands more - ye i could but i have enough to not care about it. so why should i play in relisting shit effectively only wasting my time.

[Arcanines]

Oh my he cares for himself, because obviously you're not being selfish here right? Could it be you care about the "economy" of the AH just because you have interest in it? Again, nobody cares that you lose profit, just stop being a thief or stop selling things if you can't compete with undercuts.

He said, ''I only care about myself'' good thats fine, no problem THEN WHY UNDERCUT BY MORE than 1 copper. Do the math, 2 copper vs 1 copper, is 1 copper. good, you just killed your own profits by 1 copper. For an item you know will sell, transmog is another beast. But that isn't the point of this thread.

Would you sell starlight roses for 60g if they where on AH for 80? No you wouldn't, you KNOW they sell. Theres a big difference, which you're clearly being ignorant about.

im not killing my profit - im earning exackly the profit i wanted to earn - if i wanted to earn more i would sell it more expensive but maybe i like liquidating my assets

its called cost of lost oportunities - yes in sitaution A i will earn less but i have free assets to invest into situation B while yours are frozen in AH for unknown amount of time.

See post above.

[Justpassing]

I'll undercut you massively. I just want to watch the world burn.

[Meiffert]

I dont get it. Please is there anyone who can explain this to me?

Sure. Let's say I can make flasks and it costs me 500g to create one on average.

There are hundreds of flasks on the AH for 900g, 899g 99s 99c, 899g 99s 98c etc.

Now, I can put up flasks for 899g 99s 97c and maybe 1 or 2 will sell before someone undercuts me again. I could stand on AH with some addons running monitoring the price 24/7, canceling auctions and reposting the flask another 2 copper cheaper, but I don't have time for that nor is it fun for me.
So in reality I end up selling 1 flask on average, then someone undercuts and 12 hours later I get the rest back in mail.
I make total profit of ~400g.

The other option is posting 10 flasks for 700g. They will almost always all sell. Often enough, they sell instantly, because someone is eager to get them cheap or someone even buys them all to resell them at 900.
This way I make only 200g per flask, but I sell them quickly and reliably and make a total profit of 2000g faster and easier.

Its like if you have 2 piles of gold infront of you and there is 1000G and 950G and you have to choose one. Who would choose the one with 950G?? Its same principle.

It's more like 2 piles of gold respawning every 10 minutes. One has 950g and the other has 1000g and 50 players trying to loot it.



If you really think that the items are sold way below market value, why don't you just buy it out and resell for higher?

[De Lupe]

I dont get it. Please is there anyone who can explain this to me?

As buyer: When i need something and go to AH i will buy the most cheap version of that item. I dont care if it cost 1750G or 1700G. Will buy the cheapest one.
I belive everyone will do that, you need that item afterall.

As seller: I go to AH and undercut the lowest price by 1 copper. Anyone who will want to buy that item will buy the one i put there. He doesnt care if it is 7G or 6G 99S 99C. This will max my profit for selling it.

So why there are people who cant undrerstan this. If you undrcut more then 1% of price not only you are damaging economy but also you dont get so much money as you could have. Just why?? And if there is something for absurd price noone will buy it and price will go down in time.

Its like if you have 2 piles of gold infront of you and there is 1000G and 950G and you have to choose one. Who would choose the one with 950G?? Its same principle.

I'll buy the 7G item just to SPITE the guy who cut by 1C.


That point aside, when I put stuff on the AH, I don't really care to max my profits. The materials/items were free which means anything above vendor price is profit, so I could sell them at 25% of the current market price to guarantee that mine sell. I have neither the time nor the patience to play the AH game, so I want my shit to sell the first time. Plain and simple.

[vilynn]

It definitely depends on what you're selling. If youre selling mats, especially current tier mats, that are likely to go very quickly, you should probably sell only a few coppers lower because they will likely sell at the price the market keeps it at. Many people posting at around the same price means it has generally equalized to what people will pay for it.

Selling transmog/high ilvl gear is different. If you have a one-off you picked up from trash on a raid you will likely have it for a while until the right buyer comes along for it, and it will be priced higher if the person is willing to sit on it for a bit to maximize profit. They'll sell way lower to get it done with faster, if they aren't interested in playing the AH and just want to get it out of their bags, etc.

In my case I really like crafting, I do alot of transmog gear from previous xpacs and most of it is rare or hard to get materials. I try to price my gear affordably based on mats and time spent trying to get it, and if the recipe is a rare world drop.. etc. But I'm also looking to sell it regularly, so I bring the price down because I will make more money selling 3 in a week than I will selling 1 in a month. Occasionally some reseller will buy my gear and repost it (usually adding a couple of 00 to the end) and it appears Im the one trying to undercut them by some obscene amount. It really boils down to there isnt just one way to look at or sell things on the AH, if someone is selling less than you buy it up and sell it higher or hold on to yours until the price goes back up to what you do want to sell for.

Not everyone on the AH is a bot out to get you, as many posters seem to think :P

[Deleted]

Because it doesn't work. Unless there's very few of said item available at a time undercutting by 1 copper means that i'd have to check my auctions constantly which i don't want to do. Try undercutting by 1c on a fast moving market and then see if any of your items sell. In order for that to have a good chance of working you also need to know when items sell or not. If it's a Tuesday and i post Potions of Prolonged power i'll probably not undercut the lowest because the price is at one of the lowest points during the week. In order to reliably sell those for good profit i need to know the price per week day and how it moves between that, the ~amount of items sold so that i can put them up at a reasonable price i.e. if i'm reasonably sure that 3k pots will sell in the next couple of hours i can put mine just below the price of item #2k to account for extra listings.

The above applies for more or less anything where the items aren't extremely scarce i.e. rare transmog items. On slower moving items i.e. obliterum undercutting by 1 copper will only fuck you over if you don't know how the prices move throughout the week(as slight as that is) as well as the current price trend for obliterum overall. Undercutting by 1 copper doesn't achieve that much. You get slightly more profit at the risk of your auctions not selling unless you know what you're doing. Surprisingly a lot of people aren't interested in price trends for items, price variance during the week, etc. so undercutting by 5% is a good start point that guarantees you that your items will sell if they're around the actual market price.

Undercutting by 1c works for me and I don't sit at AH almost at all.

Bottom line is people just need to get used to it. That's how market works and if someone undercuts by 20% or so, well that's his right :P

[Soikona]

I undercut because: a.) I'm an asshole, b.) I want to sell things quickly, c.) I could give two fucks about "virtual economy" and d.) if I get an angrily worded message from somebody who covets the AH like a precious commodity, it honestly makes my day.

Wouldn't call you an arsehole but i agree with this guy!

[Axelond]

The most common ways people do big undercuts is when they post bigger stacks of like 10+ items and they put the price as something even. Like best food is 74g each. Someone posts 15x for 1000g instead of 1109 gold. Now you undercut everyone to 66g 67s the next person will come along and his addon will post singles for 66g 66s. Now market is undercut.

[Amerissis]

Well, sometimes I see someone new entering the market and I want them out asap, so I crash and burn the market to scare them off. Then I resume normal business.
Sometimes I do the same to get old timers out, but that's harder as they know the game.
Sometimes I don't have time to check the AH for a few days, so I undercut by a lot to sell my stuff without having to repost every hour.
Sometimes I like to annoy people.
Sometimes I want to buy at a lower prices for my own business, so I post a few of something for a low price, wait for the undercutters and buy them out.

I am more annoyed by the constant undercutting with 1 copper then with the few large undercutters. The first ones force me to do the same, the second ones just give me cheap mats

[Deleted]

Because it works. If you don't have all day to babysit your auctions, small undercuts are less likely to get you a sale.

Yep, pretty much this.

There are so many AH campers and bots undercutting by 1 copper within a minute after you post auction, its disgusting. It got so bad on many realms that its either join them or be left out. Often the only ways to sell goods is to undercut by large margin.

Auction house UI needs to be redesigned. Badly. It promotes reselling, botting, spamming 1 stack auctions and AH camping. Normal people that just want to sell their goods can't sell because of botters/campers abusing badly designed UI.

[Beckers]

Ill be honest with you, I sometimes need fast money and undervalued items sell faster.

[Deleted]

Undercutting by 1c works for me and I don't sit at AH almost at all.

Bottom line is people just need to get used to it. That's how market works and if someone undercuts by 20% or so, well that's his right :P

It works but it's not optimal in terms of selling your stuff. If you post very few items or stacks you've got a good chance but when posting a couple hundred auctions if you don't post them properly taking into account everything you will end up selling a few and then getting the rest of them back in your mailbox when the auctions expire.

[ItachiZaku]

As buyer: When i need something and go to AH i will buy the most cheap version of that item. I dont care if it cost 1750G or 1700G. Will buy the cheapest one.
I belive everyone will do that, you need that item afterall.

I don't do that. Even this week, I was looking for... well, shit, I forgot what I was looking for. Anyways, someone had 1 of an item up for say 985, and there were 4 other people with a combined 20 items up with the lowest being 984.93 or some shit. I bought the highest priced. 2 reasons, the first being that the person with the highest price was probably just selling a 1 off item, when I do that, i'll undercut by a lot just so I don't have to worry about it anymore. It's not a commodity that I sell for a wow living, it's something I randomly picked up and I'm getting rid of it. I know how it feels, so I feel I'm helping him out. The second reason, in that example, the overall "savings" was only a matter of a few copper. No big deal, so I'm sticking it to the scumbag undercutters.

When I sell stuff myself, it really depends on the item/commodity. One off items i'll usually undercut by 20-40%, sometimes 60%, if it's a big rare item and I don't want to have to worry about reposting it... ever. I will usually never buy up product to repost higher, but it has happened. I normally try to sell stacks and I simply won't post, if I feel the stack price is too low. And when I undercut, it's not by one stupid ass copper.

To me, when you undercut or outbid by 1 copper, you aren't being a business man, you're just being an asshole.

[Zelorra]

I always undercut as much as I want. And I always giggle at the thought that some "1 copper, man, it has to be 1 copper" idiot will explode somewhere...

The reason I undercut more is that I don't want to be undercut by a fucking loser with a fucking bot in the next 30 seconds.

[Coldkil]

Sure. Let's say I can make flasks and it costs me 500g to create one on average.

There are hundreds of flasks on the AH for 900g, 899g 99s 99c, 899g 99s 98c etc.

Now, I can put up flasks for 899g 99s 97c and maybe 1 or 2 will sell before someone undercuts me again. I could stand on AH with some addons running monitoring the price 24/7, canceling auctions and reposting the flask another 2 copper cheaper, but I don't have time for that nor is it fun for me.
So in reality I end up selling 1 flask on average, then someone undercuts and 12 hours later I get the rest back in mail.
I make total profit of ~400g.

The other option is posting 10 flasks for 700g. They will almost always all sell. Often enough, they sell instantly, because someone is eager to get them cheap or someone even buys them all to resell them at 900.
This way I make only 200g per flask, but I sell them quickly and reliably and make a total profit of 2000g faster and easier.

This is the perfect example of using the AH wrong. You don't get things back because of undercutters - you get them back because the market has a surplus of goodies and not all gets sold. That's why you don't sell.

Taking the flasks: it has zero sense putting them at like morning in AH when everyone is at work and there's a 12 hour timespan in which all people do the same thing. You'll end at the bottom of the list and your goodies will not sell. Instead, put them in AH at just a couple hours before peak/raid time. The massive daily undercuts will be less efficients because you'll have hordes of people buying them just before entering the istance, and most stuff will sell.

There will always be thousands of undercutters. The whole AH economy is managed not by people but by automated addons for the most part.

It's all about timing and monitoring the AH. If you're not doing that, you're just losing gold. And you can not care, but it's still a fact you it's you using poorly the AH, and not people selling stuff at too high prices.

It sums up to "I WANT GOLDS NAO AND I CANNOT WAIT" so you (generic you) put stuff at half the price so you can immediately see the "a buyer has been found..." messages.

Guess what, patience and planning net much better rewards. Feel free to skip them

- - - Updated - - -

The reason I undercut more is that I don't want to be undercut by a fucking loser with a fucking bot in the next 30 seconds.

But you will be no matter the price. Because people uses AH addons automatically without reading numbers. The only output is you getting less gold and goodie price dropping down faster.

[Glaziola]

I always undercut by approximately 40% i need my gold fast, i hate it when items get returned in the mailbox. I dont give a shit about anyones profits, i need the gold to pay for gametime.

[Zelorra]

But you will be no matter the price. Because people uses AH addons automatically without reading numbers. The only output is you getting less gold and goodie price dropping down faster.

So do those that undercut me, so that makes me happy, because I hate those fucking addons and the fuckers who use them too...