A great feature that was added to Quick Auction 3 a little later in its development is the ability to run a “status” scan.
What this scan does is look at the items you currently have in your inventory that you have set up a group for in quick auctions 3. It will report back how much the lowest auction is currently going for, what your threshold is set at, and how many are posted.
How can you use this information? If the price of the current lowest price is well below your threshold price you can buy up these items and essentially reset the market!
Resetting Markets
In this example I’ll use a case study of how it can be applied to Jewelcrafting, but I reckon it’d work for pretty much every other profession (except for glyphs, it is so easy for someone else to just craft another 5 glyphs and undercut your reset item prices.)
The problem we see happen a lot in many markets are the prices will be very juicy, up to 150% or 200% of the usual going rate. You have your Solid Sky Sapphires posted at 49g (having bought the raw gem for 9g) and looking to get a nice return on these. Then someone comes along and dumps 5 solid skys for 14g each, what a bummer!
You have two options now, you can either buy up the 5 solid skys the player posted, making your 49g auctions the lowest priced again, or you can just wait it out hoping that those 5 lower ones sell fast making yours the lowest again.
However, sometimes before you get ready to post your newly crafted stock of gems the markets are already low and QA3 will just say “Skipping item, below threshold” and you assume that the market is bad. But often times it may just be 1 or 2 items posted for 50% of the going rate that you could just buy out and then relist for 150% of the value!
Case Study of How I Reset the JC market
You can see from the image above that I ran the status scan. I then quickly compare the value difference between my threshold and the lowest priced auction. I also have a spreadsheet of the maximum price I buy each gem uncut.
If the price of the cut version of the gem is going for lower than the price I’ll buy uncut gems, I’ll buy those up (only ones that I know sell well) This not only provides me with more stock but it’ll raise the price instantly so I can make a larger return on the gems I post now.
Relentless Earthsiege Diamond
I buy earthsiege diamonds for 38g each, so I can buy up these 29g auctions.
I could just buy up those 29g items, but if I bought out the 39g ones too (which is 1g above my “buy” price) then there wouldn’t be any gems up and I could determine the price!
I chose to do this and relisted them at 135g. If one sells I’ll make 100g profit (covering the costs of 2.5 gems I bought)
Case Study #2 – Don’t Undercut All The Time
Other times, you’ll do your status scan and see that there’s 1 or 2 cuts posted but they’re posted just high enough above your threshold that you wouldn’t feel comfortable buying it to flip, but you don’t want to undercut that price, because you run the risk of having the market set at that price or go lower if others come to undercut.
My buy price for dreadstones is 130g, so 168g would only give me a 28g profit. With only 1 currently on the auction house I know that it will eventually be sold fast so I should post my stock higher as that will leave mine as the only ones left.
I posted that auction last night. Notice that my time left is 48 hours! (should be 12h post) I posted this with Auctioneer instead and it seems they have a problem with posting time as well just like Quick Auctions 3 did (but now fixed). I found that auctioneer posted a “beta” version of auctioneer that fixes this problem and I can confirm I’ve tried it and all is good now.
I checked back this morning and saw one of them sold at 215g, so I made 55g profit on that gem instead of only 28g profit.
Give this a try with other markets. As long as you only buy out items which are below material costs then you should always make a profit. Be sure of exactly what your lowest costs are. Buying low priced items and reselling for a bit of a premium is one way I’ve made a lot of gold using WoW Schools guide.
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Great use for the features.
On a side note, any chance of getting a detailed guide, (or link to one) on how to use the addons you talk about. Taking me forever to figure out the tricks of using them. So much info is pressed at you in such a compact way (with little to no description), that I know I’m not getting the most out of them. This is where that forum you were thinking about would be great.
People on my server have lowered eternal fire’s quite low, down to about 20-21g a piece, and they are usually at 28-32.
I was thinking about flipping but I just felt like it would not be worth it, instead I simply wait until the price goes back up again.
I have over 800 fire’s to sell lol, I would like to thank you for sharing the whole frozen orb thing for 3.3.3, it has made me a lot of money so far