This week a guy posted on reddit on his extremely impressive flipping journey in WoW Classic. He went from 1c to 1000 gold with just a level 1 character in a fairly short amount of time.
So let’s take a look at how he did it and what we can learn.
Don’t underestimate trade chat
Trade chat is a severely underestimated area for goldmaking for many people. Generally speaking you can usually get better or faster deals in trade than you can on the AH. It does require quite a bit more time to finalize a deal, but it’s still well worth it for the right item.
Smoketrickz did it by focusing mostly on BoEs and other relatively expensive items. This makes by far the most sense as these items are harder to gauge in price, and due to the low chance of getting one players may want to just move it to secure the gold.
My Experience with trade
I used trade chat quite a bit around the time I transfered. I moved several big tickets over with me. I sold a nightslayer belt by gradually trading down, first to a Hand of Edward the odd + some gold and then to more gold alongside two flasks of supreme power.
You do need to be willing to negotiate, and you can get taken advantage of, as there are players out there that are very good at social engineering.
How can you avoid getting fooled
The main thing you need is to be sure of your estimate of the value of an item. Use TSM and the market value, region market value and pricing data from bootybaygazzette.com. Together this will give you a good idea of what the general price for an item is.. Try to buy for 60-80% of the market value and sell items for 100-120% of the market value. This will give you room for negotiations, while still keeping risks low. You should also be able to move items quickly if needed and still get a profit if you stick to these levels.
Finding deals
Obviously we need a good idea of which items to target. The spreadsheet Smoketrickz used gives a great starting point. He traded t1 gear, Librams, BoEs and materials among other things. You will have to scour the AH and look for deals and do the legwork of messaging players to get good prices and good items. This is more time consuming than pure flipping, but the profit margin can be higher.
I would suggest experimenting with different approaches to sellers. I have not done this myself, so I can’t give you a recipe, you will have to test it out as you go.
Selling items
When selling items you also want to post in trade. It’s important to stand out, so start cultivating some kind of persona. It can be fairly easy, just add a little bit generic intro, or you can shill hard for the item you’re selling. Enchanter’s do this all the time on my level with messages like “Cuddlebear’ enchanting shop open for business! Got all enchants”, so adapt to whatever you feel comfortable with.