You’ll notice in very competitive markets, such as glyphs, you go to check the mailbox for sold auctions and all you are getting back are expired unsold items.
You priced your item fairly, the item is in demand, so what went wrong? The problem is that you are constantly being undercut by 1 copper on all of your auctions by your competitors, preventing you from being the lowest auction.
These competitors are called “Auction House Campers” (a term coined by Gevlon) and they camp out at the auction house, constantly scanning their current auctions to ensure that their item is the lowest priced.
When you go to list a couple of your glyphs, the competitor’s addon will notify them that their auction has been undercut and they go through a canceling cycle with the Quick Auctions 2 addon, which removes only the auctions that are now undercut (by you) so they can repost them at the new price, right under yours. Some of these AH campers are so ruthless that your auction will be up for only a few minutes before they undercut it with enough quantity so they get all the sales.
I have been at a war with a few of these AH campers and I want to share with you how I have dealt with them. I have made more gold this way other than what I use in Luke’s Guide to make my gold.
Dealing With Undercutters
AH Camping Method
Fight fire with fire, after you mass post all your auctions (undercutting by 1 copper of course) log off and do something else on your main for a while, then after 30 minutes or so log back on and cancel all your undercut auctions using Quick Auctions 2.
Not undercut yet? – You’re in luck, the AH campers are not that aggressive and you should have gotten sales by now and continue doing so.
Are you undercut? – QA2 will report back who undercut you, add these names to your friends list, are they still online? are they in a city with an auction house? if they are they are most likely poised to be ready to undercut you again right after you repost. If they aren’t they may have YOU on their friends list waiting for you to log off before you log back on, check to see if they log on right when you log on your main and you’ll know if this is the case.
Now there are a few options you can take here, you can become an AH camper yourself by constantly canceling/reposting every 10 or so minutes to remain the lowest price. I only recommend this during peak time, when the majority of sales are occurring, and only if you are earning high volume sales and high profit for each item so that it is worth your time sitting at the auction house instead of crafting other items or going out gathering.
If it just seems like there are multiple AH campers and you are undercut 5 times over in the span of 30 minutes and not getting any sales, I’d recommend a different approach.
Deep Undercutting
Let me point out that there are two different versions of deep undercutting, undercutting by large amounts (from 80g down to 20g) and undercutting to your minimum threshold you’re willing to sell at. The first one will do nothing but cause the AH campers to continue undercutting, but the 2nd will push them out of the market.
This method is great if you don’t have time to sit at the auction house and are dealing with AH Campers.
What you do is once you notice a majority of your glyphs are being undercut, you drop the prices across ALL of your auctions, to a price that is still a little bit of profit for you but JUST above cost.
For example: glyphs cost is usually covered by the price you can sell snowfall inks at (a stack of herbs is 15g and 1 snowfall ink sells for 15g). It takes you around 5 seconds to craft each glyph (including milling time) so if you set your rate or time to 1,000g/hr you would have to sell all the glyphs at (60 minutes/5 seconds = 12 glyphs/minute = 720glyphs/hr. 1,000g/720 = 1g 38s for 1 ink glyphs.
So what you do is bring down ALL the glyphs you can make to a floor of 2g 50s for 1 ink glyphs, and 3g 50s for 2 ink glyphs, what this will do is any AH camper will have to do so much work for such little profit if they undercut below this while you can just post and leave them up for a day and go do more profitable gold making activities or have some fun playing. The campers will eventually leave the market or continue to battle it out for 20 silver profits, and in this case you should just keep away as you could be more profitable doing dailies!
My Results
I had around 4 aggressive AH Campers on my server when I entered the Inscription market and was disgruntled that I had to spend so much time AH Camping that I couldn’t level my alts or enjoy other aspects of the game. After making small profits with the AH camping method I decided to switch modes on December 5th, 2009.
Deep Undercutting Results
What I did was adopt a posting strategy where my fallback price was 30g, if ANYONE undercut one of these auctions by even 1 copper I’d undercut immediately right down to 3g (x3 posted) and leave it there until it expired or sold.
Here are my earnings from this method:
December 5th – 38 sales total x 2g 89s profit per = 109g profit (yuck, AH Campers still undercutting my 2g 89s auctions but I only have to do one undercut cycle)
Dec 6th - 48 sold at 2g 89s and 4 sold at 28g = 250g 72s profit (still low but some improvement and 28g sales)
December 7th – 45 glyphs sold at 2g 89s and 11 sold at 30g = 460g 5s profit (much better improvement, competitors aren’t logging on as much)
AH Camping Results
After keeping track of my competition and noticing that they are hardly logging on anymore, probably frustrated by the low glyph prices, I switched my strategy now back to the AH Camping method to only undercut all auctions by 1 copper.
I only did this because my competition wasn’t undercutting my higher auctions anymore and I didn’t see them logging on.
December 8th – 59 glyphs sold at various prices: sum = 1,089g profit
December 9th – 118 glyphs sold = 1,588g 28s profit (Patch day, I was selling out of all my glyphs, had 5 of each made, and should have had a back up stock ready, 1 undercutter was back)
So that brings us to today, I successfully got all the AH Campers to back off after 3 days of dropping the whole market to 3g glyphs which allowed me to sneak the prices back up to 30g each. No doubt the high prices will lure the campers back but once I see the competition getting fierce again I’ll repeat my methods, crash the market and do other things that make me more gold an hour like things in Luke’s guide until I notice them not logging on again and then profit.
I believe this is the only way you can run a profitable glyph business when there are aggressive AH campers, try it out on your server and let me know if you experience higher profits.
I’ll post more updates on my glyph business and ways I can get more profit – if you want to be notified when I updated be sure to subscribe to the RSS
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The bastard competition on my server is very persistent. I’ve tried deep undercutting but these guys will let prices go below 1G and won’t take a hit. They’ll just buy the underpriced glyphs and re-post them. I don’t have enough cheap sources of herbs and time to push them out of the market so I’ve given up on that. They seem to be camping the AH and there’s 5-6 of them.
every single glyph is at 1g? I would love it if those campers bought all my 3g glyphs all the time.. that’s 3k g/night just from glyphs.
Some people view it as a pissing contest and just undercut to the ground so they have “won” but if the market is so low that you aren’t making a profit it is just good to pick up and do other things to make gold until they get bored and find out they are making 100g/hour sitting at the AH.
I’m confused, if you’re selling them for that low then how can you afford to buy mats? Aren’t you losing money?
@Cissalie
Nope, because I am including the snowfall inks I get from milling the herbs… here’s an example.
I buy 20x adder’s tongue for 16g and get:
6x inks of the sea
1x Snowfall inks
The snowfall ink can sell for 16g or sold in runescrolls of fortitidue/off-hands(which covers my cost) and the 6 inks of the sea are now free… all the sales of the glyphs are pure profit. But I still want to sell it for enough that the milling time and crafting of the glyphs is worth my time (hence 2g 50s per)
Undercutting up till 1g not smart?
Let’s make things clear : i you drive them to 1g/glyph it means they meet pple like you very rarely; it also means that you got enough resources(money/inks/herbs) to make a threat for them.
BUT you also make a risk that they will loose their 10k/day.
So it comes to simple war in which only 2 things matter: your resources vs their(his/her)-> and they have A LOT of them (probably full bank of inks and 100k-… gold)
So, yeah, basically you cant do anything except if you attack with many or do it constantly (with many pple (=casuals)) so your total resources > their
Makes you think, doesn’t it? The market is a living being itself, in a way. There are people who accept the prices…and there are those who BEND the prices. Think about that for a minute. Nice tips mate.
very good Guide but when the prices is at 1-3g all the time wth are you suposed to do then?