I currently flip pretty much anything across every EU server and just wanted to share a few pointers as I have seen quite a few people asking about flipping recently.
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Let’s start flippingFirst things first be careful about your spending at the start. Pets cost very little to post but that won’t be the same for everything you are buying and more than once I overspent and had to go back to just selling pets when I was sitting on 500k+ worth of stuff to sell which just sucks. So, I have just listed some methods to be finding deals to flip …
· TSM Great Deals https://www.tradeskillmaster.com/great-dealsTSM great deals is not a great place long term to be picking stuff up however I do think it is worth it when you are first starting out. There is a lot of crap that popups that will never sell but if you stick to mostly transmog, pets etc you should do fine. A lot of the time there will be nothing worth buying on a lot of servers but when your checking so many at once you will, over time, build up stock. The advantage of TSM great deals however is that when you do manage to find something the prices are usually stupidly low so you have to invest very little which is great when you are starting out.
· TSM Buying ScansI imagine most people on here know how to use TSM to do a buying scan and if you don’t you need to learn how to use it efficiently before even attempting anything else in this guide. The biggest advantage TSM scans has over every other method is that you can do it largely afk and that you are seeing live data. Every other method pulls data from Blizzard which gets released at various hourly times depending on your server so by running the TSM scans you can get first shot at the deals. The disadvantages to this method are that it is time consuming (although this gets much better with multiple accounts) so try and keeps the group sizes down.
· Undermine Journal (UMJ) Current Region Prices Search https://theunderminejournal.com/Example Region Price Chart
If you search anything on the undermine journal and scroll all the way to the bottom, you’ll have a current regional prices chart (as pictured in the link above). This is an efficient way to look at the prices of anything across your whole region and to quickly pick out obvious bargains with flipping potential.
You can make these manual searches much faster by using a custom code. Everything on the UMJ has a number code for example Plans: Felsteel Longblade is item/23629. If you click custom (bottom right of the UMJ frontpage) and list the custom numbers it will give you a full list of items which makes it much easier.
Let’s expand on the
Plans: Felsteel Longblade and add in a few more BC recipes in the mix so our custom code looks like this 23629; 23630; 23631; 23634; 23620 . So, we click submit (you don’t need to fill in the compare with box) on our custom code, click Plans: Felsteel Longblade, check the current regional prices chart, click back on our browser, click submit on custom code, click next on your list, rinse and repeat to quickly get through your whole list and scan lots of items region wise efficiently. You can make these lists as extensive as you want and I save all my different ones in a word document.
The main advantages of this method are that it is largely done outside of game (so you can be doing other stuff like running scans), is fast and efficient and you are largely specialising in less items so are more knowledgeable about them. The big disadvantage is that because the UMJ pulls info from Blizzard the deals you do find can be gone by the time you get to the auction house.
To buy or not to buy?If the price is ridiculously low, you know you can sell it and it’s a single item then obviously buy. If you can make it so you are the only one selling an item on a server with a low investment then that is a massive bonus. What do you do if things are more complicated? I put them into scenarios that I find come up most commonly when I have found an item that I know has a region market value of 30,000g but is listed at 2,000g buyout.
Theoretical ItemRegion market Value 30k
Region Sale Rate 0.05
Scenario 1: The Easy Buy1@ 2,000g
Someone has listed at well under value. This is quite often at default listing price when there was nothing else on the auction house and the seller had no idea about the items value.
Verdict: Quick buy and instant relist (I would be listing at 50-60k due to having no competition)
Scenario 2: The Easy Buy part II1@ 2,000g 5@ 30,000g
Verdict: Someone has listed at well under value and clearly just wants a quick sale as he saw everyone else listed at 30k. Quick buy, relist at 30k, likely to get undercut due to number of other people but you will eventually make profit.
Scenario 3: We need more bagspace Scotty!20@ 2,000g
Verdict: The numbers are a bit of an extreme example but this happens quite a lot on bigger servers. You can literally buy out the lot and one sale at market value will almost cover the whole cost but do you really want twenty of something with a 0.05 sale value? I tend to (but defiantly not always) stay away from these as there is usually a reason why there is such a huge supply and low price (the sheer size of the server) in the first place therefor even if you buyout the lot it won’t be long before other people are listing more. You could potentially buy a few and throw them in a guild bank and hope in time the price heads north.
Scenario 4: The Sylvannus plot scenario1@ 2,000g 3@ 3,500g 3@ 5,000g 3@8,000g 3@15,000 3@20,000 3@25,000
Verdict: Probably the worst situation you can come across when you know something is listed stupidly undervalue. The prices are all staggered so resetting the market is far too expensive. The prices are so low and supply is so high it is unlikely that the price will increase anytime soon. Buying to relist instantly is barely worth the effort. That all being said, like with the last scenario, you could always buy it up and throw it in the bank but I tend to completely avoid.
Know your markets: notes about fluctuating supply and demandI mention earlier about the advantage of specialising in a small amount items and therefor you are more aware of what is going on with them. As you may well have noticed from the screenshots, I primarily dealt in island transmog over the past 4 months. Demand for island transmog is fairly consistent week to week, supply however can vary dramatically via the weekly salvage available to purchase. For example, weeks when Rotting Mire Salvage is available to purchase players will be grinding islands to buy the salvage to primarily get the Squarks mount but as a by-product of this they will be picking up Razorfin set pieces that they will throw on the auction house.
If these were huge undercuts (scenario 2 above) then I would buy them out but generally I wouldn’t want to buy any of these until the night before reset. If you can leave these for the full week that the salvage is available the affect can be quite dramatic and it was not unusual to see prices drop by 75% as people just aggressively undercut to dump their mount farming by products. Basically, you are aiming for the scenario 3 above with all the listings being clumped together at well under market value a fraction of what they were at the start of the week for your to nicely pick up the lot up. The difference with this and scenario 3 above is that that supply is suddenly going to drop dramatically when the Rotting Mire Salvage rotates out and usually you are going to be the only person with any stock so you can charge pretty much what you want.
The point is just be aware of anything that will dramatically affect prices of what you deal in now or in the future. I feel the value of island transmog will increase during early Shadowlands as supply will drop dramatically as hardly anyone will runs islands. I do however except a dramatic falloff as soon as Blizzard allow solo queuing by level 60’s (which they have said is coming) so I’m now pulling back on my investments in this area.
How much should I sell for?A hundred factors can affect your selling price. Normal everyday factors that every goblin deals with like the market value, quantity available on the market etc are the most obvious. There are however factors more specific to this methodology of gold making that can affect selling price. When you are starting out you are desperate for quick sales to get more capital, to do more flips in this case selling faster for less could well be making you more gold.
You can sell stuff for utterly insane amounts if you are patient Crazy Sales 1 but these will literally never/take forever to sell at this sort of price. If you are going through a phase of investing a huge amount of time in your flipping then more realistic selling prices will likely be better for you. If, like me currently, you are taking a bit of a step on the amount of time you’re investing then charging these insane prices will make you less gold but you also lose dramatically less stock.
ConclusionEven if you never intend on trying this out, I hope you find this an interesting read. Just to make one thing clear I have left a few things out that are my own little secrets for now :). If anyone has any advice on how to improve, I would gladly take it on board. I apologise that the English is a bit sucky but I have been knackered writing this after work for the last few days.
Thanks all and see you in Shadowlands!
/Kaychak
