Getting out of crowded markets is an effective way to save a lot of time. The more competition the more you have to work for less profit.
Identifying high competition markets
The most reliable way to notice if a market is high competition is to notice a change in your sale rate. If you are suddenly getting less sales on the same amount of reposting it means that the competition has stiffened relative to the demand for that specific item.
What do you do?
Generally speaking goldmakers follow the same ideas. We’re all looking for profit and that often leads to us discovering the same ideas organically. As such markets can get crowded and then emptied out again quite quickly. The main thing is to under stand what kind of markets represent strong long term value, even if the short term is more crowded.
Get out or compete
Dealing with competition is quite simple, you either leave or you stay and compete. Competing will typically involve spending more time on the AH reposting, cancel scanning and crafting, the alternative is to look for less crowded markets.
No one can be everywhere at once
No one can be everywhere, so if someone is cancel scanning constantly in one market then they are not doing it for another one. There will always be softer spots in both current expansion markets as well as old expansion items.
Examples from the current game
Right now Rank 6 legendaries are quite profitable, but also incredibly competitive. I am routinely undercut within minutes every time I post. On the other hand chained Isle gear and rank 4 legendaries are both flying off the shelves. As such it can make a lot of sense to focus a lot less on r6 legendaries and focus more on the rank 4s.
How do you find the soft spots?
So, let’s look at how we find these soft spots. One approach is to consider what the competition was doing before they entered the current market. Whatever used to be the most popular goldmaking method or market can often be very profitable (as we see with rank 4 legendaries right now!). The other alternative is to look for new markets ahead of the pack. Sadly that is often a lot hard, at least outside of expansion or patch launches, so going back to forgotten basics is generally a more successful strategy.