Burning Crusade Classic goldmaking: Material flipping primer

With the recent launch of TBC now is the time to take another look at material flipping. This goldmaking method works exceedingly well on the old auction house, so let’s look at what you need to know.

Disclaimer: Wait for prices to stabilize

Since TBC is a new expansion prices will take a little while to stabilize. While you can flip materials right now, it is very risky, and I would not suggest doing it with the settings included here. In stead focus on the principles laid out here and use auctionator to buy and sell items based on hard gold thresholds.

Once prices stabilize within a couple of more days you can start relying on dbmarket and TSM to do it on a larger scale.

Buy low, sell high.

The principle is easy, you are looking to buy materials cheaply and sell them for a higher price. In classic there are two main ways you can make this work, you can take advantage of the natural price variation throughout the week. In addition to this you can utilize stack sizing to flip as well. So let’s look at why these two things work.

The weekly reset cycle

Raids reset once a week. This leads to generally speaking much larger demand for materials and consumables just after the reset when players are gearing up to head back into raids. In addition to this play patterns vary throughout the week. Over time this generally leads to prices being lower during the weekend and peaking on the raid reset day for a wide variety of items.

If you buy when items are cheap you have a great opportunity to get extra gold when the price goes up again.

Stack sizing

Since auctions are sold in specific stack sizes in classic you can make a lot of money selling items in convenient stack sizes. One trend is that many players will just post a ton of stacks of 1. This takes a long time to buy out and is annoying. Generally speaking your auctions are usually primarily competing with auctions of the same stack size or smaller. By buying out weird stack sizes and selling materials in large even stack sizes you can generally profit quite a bit. Getting 10, 20 or even 30% more gold per item just for posting in a more convenient stack size is not unheard of.

Implementing a strategy

With TSM I like to just have a dead simple strategy where I buy materials at 80% of the market value or below. I’ll then post them across a wide variety of stack sizes with a minimum price of the market value. This gives a minimum profit of about 20%, and you can very often find items for less than 80%, giving an even higher profit margin. This won’t work well right now, as dbmarket has not stabilized yet, but within a week or so it should be a great basis for flipping, which is extremely reliable. This used to be my number one go to recommendation for players looking to get into AH-based goldmaking, and will remain so in TBC.

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