I’ve been running a material flipping experiment, and I just hit day 30. So let’s take a look at how you’re doing,
What have I been flipping?
I started out with 100 000 gold. For the first week I focused only on current expansion materials. Then I’ve slowly been adding assorted old expansion materials and consumables. I’m still missing a huge number of potential items and it will take a lot of time to get them all rolling.
Profit Margins
The screenshot below shows the resale summary of the top resale profit items. We can easily see that the profit margin is highest across the board for old expansion materials. I’ve also made gold with tons of different current expansion items.
Overall it seems like flipping can work pretty well.
Total results
After 30 days I am now sitting at 1400 gold, so I did not make much gold in terms of actual profit yet. I am however sitting on a stockpile of items that is currently posted to the AH for 330 000 gold. As you can see the Auction House value of my items has been trending up the entire 30 days.
The spike in the middle where it really started increasing was when I added old expansion items into the mix. Not surprisingly perhaps as the margins are gigantic.
Sales
My sales have mostly been hovering in the same level between 1 000 and 10 000 gold, with two exceptions. The volume does not seem to correlate too closely to the auction house value, but the biggest days have been when I have had significantly more gold available on the AH.
Overall assessment
Based on this experiment it seems like material flipping can still work. It is however a very different market than it used to be. It now requires a lot more gold to enter, and it’s much slower to make back your initial investment. It will likely take a month or two at least until I hit enough AH volume that I can make it back to 100 000 gold.