The Heavy Golden Necklace Dilemma – Or When to List and How to Price

Design: Heavy Golden Necklace of Battle is a lowish level Jewelcrafting recipe. It is sold in several cities, one per old world contintinent per faction and it is a limited availability item. This means that the NPC vendor only sells one of these at a time. This makes it a great item to grab and resell on the Auction House.

This post is not really about the joys of limited quantity item reselling, though. It’s about deciding if and when and for how much you should sell a particular item that you have bought for resale.

When I went to the Auction House with my recipe in hand, I found that there were already 3 for sale. Quite often, when listing a limited quantity recipe, I don’t list if there is more than one already listed at market price. But you can see from the screen shot of Appraiser that all three are in the ‘Red Zone’ for pricing. That is, they are all listed way above market value. Most likely, someone listed one when there were none for sale and tried to push the value up (or didn’t know the market value).

So what to do? The great thing about these recipes are that they are almost entirely profit, so I could choose to massively undercut these guys and still make a good profit on the item. On the other hand, you can’t really sell mass quantities of them. the market won’t absorb that many (which is why I list when there aren’t many others). So it pays to make as much as possible per limited item that you resell.

When I take a look at TUJ, I see that someone has been posting these babies everyday at the same price for the past week or so. Same person? Same item even because it isn’t selling? Either way, there is no point waiting for him to stop listing and list mine at the same value. Its time to break his up his Heavy Golden Necklace party a little! So I am going to list mine at 30g and see what happens. The danger here is that I make that design less profitable for everyone, including me. The goal is to get control of the market and then gradually push that price back up once I have seen for myself what the market will actually pay (which is not the same as what stuff gets listed at!).

So what are the take homes from this exciting story?

1. How much can the market take?
   If you are selling copper ore, it can take lots. If you are selling limited quantity recipes, it can’t. Copper ore gets used in many, many recipes and other uses. The recipe can be learned once by each character who learns that tradeskill. Don’t flood your market.
2. What are current listings compared to market price?
   Use Auctioneer color coding in Appraiser to see this. The little numbers under each of your items in the left pane indicates how many of each price band are listed right now. Blue, green, yellow, orange, red from way below market to way above. Yellow means that number of items are being sold at around market price. If you see a bunch of blue and green numbers under an item, it might be best to hang on to it.
3. Controlling a market is worth more than taking a hit on a listing or two
   Now this might be more valuable for higher volume items like tradeskill mats. As already discussed, there really isn’t that much market to control in limited quantity recipes. But if you are just starting to build your fortune and you are leveling a character and don’t yet have high level tradeskills, it can still be a useful one that leaves you plenty of time for leveling.