What is the relation between frequency of reposts of auctions, profit, market size?

[Deleted]

For example, if I repost an auction every 12 hours, in a very busy market, does it make a difference, or should the repost be done every at least 3 hours for a regural profit, because undercuts would be done in 3 hours? Similarly, would reposting only every 12 hours be almost similarly profitable to reposting every 3 on a light market?

A graph of such relationships might be fun. I wonder if anyone has empirical evidence.

By the way, I guess one could talk about "big markets" and "small markets" being both different realms, but also different products.

[Zoov]

I'd like to know the answer, too. I can say from my own experience, reposting in order to undercut is more effective on slow items or items in less demand. Items in demand will be bought soon enough, and your higher priced ones may get bought anyway (obviously it depends). I do not know how to calculate the elasticity for an item, but that'd be a highly helpful statistic for specific goods.

I mainly just post and don't look back. So far it's worked well. However, I do know the most successful merchants do spend an awful lot of time at the auction house. I am just not sure what exactly they do in all the time...perhaps run mods of some kind.

[Deleted]

I have 2 accounts. One with my main chars i raid, PvP or do Achievements etc. Second is classic account and i use it to sell stuff. I have two guild banks to store mats and items i sell. This is very handy because i can raid and check AH without leaving raid.

I undercut everything by little amount. 1 coppers is enough. Most people buy the cheapest.
For example most of the time it looks like this
My auction Ebonsteel Beltbuckle x3 149,99,97
Seller X Ebonsteel Beltbuckle x5 149,99,98
Seller Y Ebonsteel Beltbuckle x1 149,99,99
list goes on..

Ofc this sparks the undercutting wars. I have a feeling AH goblins understand that killing market is not profit (attempt to control market is different, then you crash it to drive away competition) and heavy undercutting rarely happens. When market goes too low, we reset it and start selling high again. It's a endless cycle. In my server Undercuts happen in less than 1min if it's big market.

Difference between big and small market? During patch days selling gems and enchants is like selling water in Sahara. This market saturates slowly but still you can move huge amounts of gems because there is alts and rerollers who want them.

Small market, let's take item like Khorium power core. It's needed by engineers and there's a ton of engineers. Control the supply! Buyout any Khorium ore/bars and mote of fire/primal fires. Then you can sell at your own price. You need 8 power cores for Turbo flying machine, 2 for Jeeves. Don't get crazy with price. Find the price people are willing to pay. If 500g is too much, try 450 and so on.
New engineer who has gold and is willing to use it to get new toys.. expensive kind of toys
This can give very good profits.

Try to focus having bit of both. fast selling low profit markets and slow selling high profit markets. There are plenty of markets to get rich with. In the end it's fun to open 100 mails all containing 50g and it's just as fun open 2 mails containing 2,5k gold.

I don't know if my ramblings are useful, at least i hope so.

[Projob]

I started a while back on my server trying to gather information relevant to looking at some of the larger markets in wow, similar to the information that is available at The undermine journal, or Wowuction, but with more detail. At the time I was very involved in the glyph market, and wanted to know those same questions. I got in contact with a number of the big sells and tried to get them on board with pretty good success. In the end, I found an excel script to dump all of the data from a beancounter (it's an addon that keeps track of sales and purchases if you're not familiar with it, I think it might even come as part of Auctioneer?).

Long story short, I had a metric shit load of data, but it kind of all fell by the wayside when Cata landed and I never got around to doing much with it. I'd be very interested in digging this all back up again if there was any major interest, and I'd be more than happy to add my own data to the pool (about 2 expansions worth of glyph, enchant and gem data now) if anyone thinks it would be helpful.

My original thought was to generate supply and demand curves as well as willingness to pay data that would have been helpful. But as I said, I never really got around to it.

[Deleted]

You know why people say all servers are differemt? Its because they are.
I guarantee of you were on my server then if you were only listing enchants or gems every 6 or 3 hours you would make nothing unless you seriously undercut the market.
All depends what market and what competition. some i relist regularly otherwise i dotn sell and others I cna get away with 2x a day.

[Deleted]

I started a while back on my server trying to gather information relevant to looking at some of the larger markets in wow, similar to the information that is available at The undermine journal, or Wowuction, but with more detail. At the time I was very involved in the glyph market, and wanted to know those same questions. I got in contact with a number of the big sells and tried to get them on board with pretty good success. In the end, I found an excel script to dump all of the data from a beancounter (it's an addon that keeps track of sales and purchases if you're not familiar with it, I think it might even come as part of Auctioneer?).

Long story short, I had a metric shit load of data, but it kind of all fell by the wayside when Cata landed and I never got around to doing much with it.

hehe, I guess most care about those things when they have nothing else to do. e.g. I left the market for hours to raid something and it was undercut on everything

[Deleted]

I just use experience and you get a feel for things if you are relisting or selling a lot. One of the things that has changed absolutely in cata and for the worse is that there is no place to hide due to addons. Addons means you can relist your entire inventory within a few minutes. I expect to be undercut on everything in gems if I go on a raid. The more you repost in profitable markets to make sure you are the cheapest then the more money you will make.

I think you have the wrong approach. By all means decide if you can make money in a profitable market, but for others who want to only list a few times then list in less competitive markets. Find your niches like everyone says. If you wnat max profits then list in both markets. Do not list if you cnat compete though as thats wasted money and effort.