Suppliers and Supplying the AH Goblins

As I said in my last post I was going to do something about suppliers and being a supplier to an AH Goblin (someones that makes tons of gold on the AH). I will break it up into 2 parts I think, the first being getting and holding onto suppliers of raw materials you need for your AH empire, and the second about being a supplier to someone else.

First off though I think I should explain the role suppliers have in the great AH gold making game. Once you start to branch out into several markets and have the gold behind you to fund new ventures or your simply moving so much stock on a daily basis you will need a steady supply of raw materials. The AH can be good for this though it is volatile and when you need those 100 stacks of elementium ore that where 40g yesterday...but now 90g per today. Your screwed pretty much. Now if you had a supplier that farms ore for you at about 40 stacks a day so at 40g a stack, you would be ok. It wouldn't be optimal but at least you could keep on making some gold as opposed to shutting shop for the day. With that, time to get into the suppliers topic I think.


Getting and loving your Suppliers

So with the above example about elementium ore been show, I'm sure we have all been in that situation before. Unable to make anything to sell, or simply unable to up with demand. Suppliers can make this easier to combat, or in best case, a potential gold mine when material prices skyrocket but your supplier doesn't charge you more to compensate themselves.

Now how to get a supplier you may now be asking. Well there are a few ways to do this. The easiest is to check the AH and see who is selling loads of the item you want every day. You can be suere they farm it en mass. Drop them a mail or whisper them and strike up a conversation. Be friendly and respectful of them and gemerally they will in turn cut you a good deal. After all, no-one likes to deal with an asshole, even if your making good coin off of them, they are generally not worth the effort.

Another way is to advertise in trade chat that your looking for someone to supply you with whatever material or jut a WTB *insert items here* PST type tell. When people start whispering you saying they have it, ask them if they would be willing to sell to you via Cash on Delivery (CoD) every so often at a set price. Again be nice about it and if they are a big farmer with a brain, they will see it as a good thing as it means they have a guaranteed sale on whatever they farm for a definate amount so they know how much they are getting when they send that CoD and can account for it easier. It also saves them the 5% AH cut too, some notice this, others don't., but if your doing in bulk CoD's like over 100 stacks, that 5% adds up pretty fast.

Now for the pricing. Always have an idea of the current AH price and how much your willing to pay, but be flexible and open to barter. The deal cuts both ways remember. For example if Elementium Ore is going for 50g per on the AH on an average day, occasionally spikes to 60 and drops to 40, you could give them an offer of about 40g per stack. That way they are not getting ripped off, the deal is good for you and it's cheap enough to be able to buy in large quantities. However be willing to go up to say 45g a stack in this example with bartering. Sometimes the potential supplier will just accept that and start CoDing you mails full of stuff. Now this leads to a sub point here.


When the supplier sends you too much!

What do you do? Well if you can afford all the stuff they are sending your way and the price you agreed on is good, keep buying! Stockpile it either in a personal Gbank, or bounce it between toons with mails if you dont have a gbank or it's full of other stuff.

Here is an example of what happened to me a little bit ago:
I managed to get 4 elementium/pyrite/obsidium ore suppliers selling ore to me at about 40g/140g/50g per. Good numbers from my servers economy. Now 2 of them were only a 3-5 mails every 2 days type farmers. Casual players that enjoy flying around Uldum no doubt, good guys/girls though. The other 2 however where big farmers, averaging 15-30 mails a day each of elementium ore and assorted other ores. After the first week I had more than I could use, but the price was so good I kept buying it up.

Why did i do this? It let me expand into other markets from my primary. I managed to get into enchanting scrolls with the amount of DE rings I could do, boosted my gem sales via being able to xmute inferno rubies and more shadowspirit metas than i would need for a week. It also let me get into blacksmithing and engineering withthe over flow. Yet I STILL had excess ore clogging my gbank and alt's mails. When I was getting ready to start cutting down on the ore suppliers, the elementium ore market spiked to 80g per and hung there for a week, however my suppliers kept the 40g per sales flowing so I could keep going, charging slightly more for the gems and other wares I was posting, with the same material cost, thus more profit.

This worked for me due to having the liquid gold to sink into the materials as an investment that I knew would make money regardless (the elementium ore was under the breakpoint where prospecting, cutting the uncommon gems and vendoring them would result in a marginal profit, so literally, zero risk). YMMV depending on profession set up and servers economy however.



Being a Supplier

Alot of people  see farming as a bad thing, a waste of precious time away from teh AH where they could be making more gold/hour. This may very well be true. I don't enjoy farming myself, however I don't see it as being a bad way of making gold, just not optimal use of time for me personally. Now if your down on your luck and just spent all your gold on PvP gear to get into heroics quicker or you generally don't have much gold to begine with or just have herbing or mining on your main, you have no doubt had to farm some seed money to get back on your feet.

Now there are plenty guides around the net for farming spots, addons like Gatherer 2 (from curse.com along with it's assorted other additions) make life easier. Now lets just say you get ready for a several hour farming fest. You have your coffee (or drink of choice) some music going and some stacks and get to it. Several hours later you have bags full of materials and ready to sell.

What options do you have?

Well option number 1 is dump it all on teh AH and pray it all sells before someone else undercuts you, which will happen quite often in the evenings. You could try and sell in trade chat. This is a good option as it makes you accessable to people looking for good deals and possibly someone looking for a supplier. Finally you could sit on the materials you farmed for later in the week when prices go higher then post onto the AH. Not advisable but it could work.

If you do any of the above you may be approched by someone looking to buy you out and possibly looking for a supplier for the items you spent time farming. Now the same rules apply as for those looking for a supplier. Let them make the initial offer of a price, barter slightly higher to get a better deal and just pretty much be a nice person.

Once you have sorted out a deal and established how often you will be CoDing them the items for the price agreed on, you can go your seperate ways and do whatever takes your fancy. Congratulations, you now have a guaranteed source of income as long as your willing to put in the effort to farm. Now just keep an eye on the AH cost for the items your selling so you can contact your buyer and adjust the prices accordingly. If they value you they will be flexible. if not then start looking for another person looking for a supplier I would say.



It's a complex topic that not many understand or do, but once you get some suppliers and gold behind you, you can make lots of gold. The reverse also works if you enjoy farming. However if you want to progress from being a supplier to being someone looking for a supplier, you do need seed money for the progression, and this is a good place to start. It also lets you do more research int eh time it takes to get to your gold goal.

In my next post I will go over some tactics to actually start making gold, be it starting with 1 gold or 1,000, I'll have some strats to get you rolling and making gold. After all, it takes money to make money!

Till next time


-Grey

Spreading Auctions over many toons.

We all have our mains we love and don't like swapping from to do stuff at times don't we? So it would only make sense to post almost everything from that toon so you can maintain the markets your mainly interested in right? Well I think thats wrong for a few reasons and am going to discuss why in this post along with some ideas on logical groupings of profession products to post from any given alt/main.

Now the main reason I don't like posting everything from my main is due to it clogging up my mail box when I cancel en mass or get a huge amount of sales. Another reason is my main is the toon I get everyone that supplies me with mats to CoD to. I've pissed off more than 1 supplier because of the 400+ mails I had in the mail box and totally missed their CoD for almost 2 days. This is reason alone to maintain your mail box, and possibly spread your auctions around.

Here is how I've got it sorted out currently. As always YMMV depending on what professions you have access to and the levels of your posters when it comes to crafting stuff that needed TW level 84 purchases like BS/LW/Tailoring.


Main:
On my main I post my enchanting and JC items. This is due to her being a JC/Ench and it's just easier that way. In her bank I have 2-5 stacks of each raw rare gem and around 2-3 stacks of uncut meta gems for rapid resupply. In an enchanting bag she also has about 200-300 hypnotic dust, 40-60 greater celestials, a few hundred infinite dust, 40 greater cosmics and an assortment of BC and old world enchanting mats for other enchants.

Alt 1:
On this alt I post all my Blacksmithing, engineering and mining goods. The PvP sets sell reasonably well as do the engineering pets. Also I'm generally swimming in elementium ore and vol earths so post about 10 Hardened Elementium Bars a day, they net me about 150% profit each and it saves me on bank/gbank space which currently is at a premium.

Alt 2:
Here is where I post Tailoring items and my Glyphs. He is a Scribe/Tailor though I've stopped posting as much as I used to due to soemone working their hardest to crash the glyph marked. Give it a week and it should be back to normal and it's only a side market I play in so it's not really bothering me. This alt will soon be GM of my second bank guild to store herbs/inks and assorted other items that are not related to Ores/Gems which my first is so packed with.


Alt 3:
This is where I post my Alch items like potions, deepstone oils, occasional flasks when profitable and any other assorted alch related items. I currently have 3 xmute masters though due to a massive influx of herbs for cheap, I'm debating swapping one to a potion master and another to a flask master. I could also level a 4th alch amongst the toons I have so I still have 2 xmute masters for truegold...when I remember to use that CD.

Now if I had LW i would post from this alt and process from there but due to not having a LW I don't bother. I am stocking up on ites to level it but it's just too much of a pain currently


Doing it all this way also makes looking at the My Sales addon and seeing which profs are most profitable and need more attention and which are not much easier. Also as I said, it keeps your suppliers happy due to them getting their gold faster and you get their mats faster to process and turn into a profit.

My next post will more than likely be on suppliers and how to get them. Also it will go into the often unmentioned art of BEING a supplier and the traps and pitfalls to watch out for, which cuts both ways as it happens.

Till then good luck on the AH and may you always make gold.

-Grey

In the begining...there was gold

OK then here we go with my first blog I've ever done. It's hopefully going to be an interesting trip  mainly about Auctioneering in World Of Warcraft along with other bit's and bob's thrown in about my time in WoW.

Some people may wonder why is it called the Coffee Stained Auctioneer? Well it's a little play on words for me really. I love my coffee, and I love playing the auctionhouse. Sometimes coffee gets spilt or knocked or whatever and you get a stain on the desk. Thus the name. I think it's appropriate for me atleast.

History

First off I think a little about me is needed before I go into anything else. First off I'm not fantastic with html linking and such so will not do much at the start until I get the hang of how to do it here and all that jazz. OK back on track...First off I'm not a millionair, not where near really. I originally started playing WoW back in 2008 or so and was pretty much just messing around after a course I was doing at a local Uni. I told myself 'Don't start playing untill you have finished your study, you have an obsessive personality and will fail if you play WoW now'.

Once I finished Uni I went off, installed wow and got hooked. The rest is history about that aspect of it. I was poor for the first 6 months or so. My first gold coin I can remember was from someone, a hunter I believe it was, that gave it to me as I was running to Org from Razorhill on my baby hunter, not even level 10 yet. I swiftly spent that on a bag from one of the bag vendors and went on my merry way, very happy.

Skip forward till 2010. I didn't get into making gold heavily till about 2010 and it was mainly just so I could afford my guilds first Crimson Deathchargers for my Lock. Cost me 40k and I thought that was alot back then. I spent a month saving up when I knew it was going to be auctioned inguild. I managed to save up 60k in that time frame, bought the mount and decided 'Hey...making gold is easy when you have a goal to aim for!' So I started doing my research, reading blogs and configuring my addons to how I wanted them to work.

Back in Wrath my main incomes came from enchanting and JC. The saronite shuffle was going strong for a long time after it petered out on many other servers and I managed to make decent coin right up till Cata. I entered Cta with 180k, 33k or so shy of my aim of being gold capped before Cata hit on Dec 7th. I didn't really mind too much because I had by then bought several other items from the Shadowmournes quest box (the teleport locket and music box).

Now that Cata is here and just ver 4 months old I decided to start this up, now that I have got my strats worked out, gold flow going and my new addiction biting me in the butt. Damned Trading Card Game things...I sware they are the devil! Spent almost 300k gold on the things already, and will spend alot more still.


Current

Ok so now I'm just goingt o do a brief outline of what I'm aiming to do with this blog witht he history sorted out.

This will be updated and posted on whenever I get the chance to do it, or when I remember cos I've got a shocking memory at times. As I said previously it will mainly be about gold making and ideas I'm trying out or have yet to tried out but getting ready to try out. Also I may do break downs on how I'm going to my aim of 500k gold by midyear. Hopefully I will hit that much sooner but thats the aim, and over 1 mill by the end of the year. I currently have roughly 147k gold on hand currently so 350k in a few months shouldn't be too hard at all really.

I'll be doing some break downs o whats selling, whats not selling and what may sell if your willing to take the risk, or I'm aboutt o take the risk with. Also there may be heroic 25 raid content thrown in as I'm an avid raider of 25 hard mode stuff.

So I hope you all will get to like what you see here and with whats to come in the future.

- Greyarea