Patch 8.2 introduced several new materials into the game and changed the demand for the existing BfA Materials quite significantly. It’s time to take a look at how the material flipping landscape looks after these changes.
Material flipping basics
If you are unfamiliar with this market the basic idea is to buy materials when they are relatively cheap and then sell them in nice even big stacks for a slightly higher price.
We use Tradeskillmaster to do this and the general setup I use is to buy materials when the price is below 80% of the market value and sell them for the full market value. This yields a 20% profit while keeping the price low enough that players are very willing to pay for it.
New materials
8.2 added 1 new material for every base type. We got a new ore, a new herb, a new cloth, new leather, new scale and new pigments and inks, as well as several new types of meat and fish. Overall the new materials are typically very high in demand right now, which makes them all great candidates for flipping.
Generally speaking materials sell better in larger stack sizes, so stacks of 200, but I like a good mix and my settings will use stack sizes of 200, 100, 50, 20 and 10. You could make an argument for omitting stacks of 10, but it should not be too different either way.
The best materials
Identifying the best candidate materials is actually pretty simple. Just multiply the market value on your realm with the region average daily sold, which is the amount of items that sell on average per day. This will give you a great view of the potential profitability of the material in question.
Obviously this is based on how the materials are used, and we’ll do a very quick rundown of each group of materials and tell you which seem relevant based on region prices and amount sold.
The top 20 materials are shown in the table below with their EU region market value and average sold. Of the 8.2 materials Zin’anthid and Osmenite show up, but Anchor weed is the number one.
General trends
The general trend is that the best opportunities come from herbs, ore, cloth and enchanting materials. Leather is relatively bad in comparison, and the same holds for ink and pigments. Fish and meat is a VERY mixed bag. I have had a ton of success with Stringy Loins earlier in the expansion, but the volume looks quite a bit lower now. Fish has low volume across the board and the same holds for inks and pigments, which drag them down in the rankings.
Items to stay away from
That being said there are some items I would not flip at all:
Thick Paleo Steak, Ultramarine pigments and inks, all the fish except Mauve Stinger, Viper Fish and Slimy Mackerel, Mistscale, Calcified bone, Tempest Hide and Hardened Tempest Hide.
These either have a very low price or a very low sales volume which makes them uninteresting. For the rest you really want to flip all of the, but you can’t go wrong starting with the ones on the top 10 list.
Buy the right amount
Take a look at the region average daily sold in the tooltip when buying. There’s no point in buying 20 000 Frenzied Fangtooth when you can only expect that 1k will even sell in total on your realm in one day.
On the other hand you can absolutely crazy on the Tidespray linen with an average daily sold value of a staggering 18 000.
Running shopping scans
My material group is split into several sub groups and I advise running them in batches. The categories in the list above are great to use as the basic shopping scans. Running fewer materials at the time will save time and you will get fewer instances of materials disappearing while you’re waiting.
Understanding the %-max price column
The %-max price column is one that generally creates a lot of confusion. If you just search for the name of a material this column will be a percentage of your normal shopping price source. By default this is 100% dbmarket. If you run a shopping scan for a group with a shopping operation the percentage in this column will be in relation to your maximum shopping price. If your maximum shopping price is 100% dbmarket then the percentages would be the same.
Since I use 80% dbmarket as the maximum price auctions priced at 100% dbmarket will show up with a percentage of 125%. This might confuse you if you’re not aware of it as I have my operation set to show auctions above the max price as well. I do this so I can quickly check if there are any massive inventories posted between my max shopping price and minimum auctioning price. If someone has 100+ stacks of 200 at 113% then I probably won’t be buying.
What to buy
Generally I buy everything that shows up below 100% when I run a shopping scan. The only exception is if there is a huge volume between my minimum and maximum price. In those cases I will not buy anything.
Results will take a little while
Material flipping is not a get rich quick scheme. You need to spend gold building up inventory before you start seeing steady sales. Most materials are cyclical so you will buy for a while and then the AH dries up and you may sell out 5000 items in a day.
You will have to shop and post auctions for at least a week and probably more than that before you get a good idea of how well it works.
I have tested my material flipping settings more than any other settings and I advise against changing the price settings. Auction amounts are something you should experiment with as your realm population and crafter population will mean that different stack sizes may be better than others. You may also want to post more total materials if you have them.
TSM Settings
You can find my TSM settings in my pastebin as usual. Good luck!
Could you make a ‘The best materials’ for your pastebin so that I dip my toe into material flipping by just focussing on those particular best sellers please?
how do you get the numbers but looking everything up manually? Is there some kind of API?
I use the TSM API to get their data that is based on the blizzard AH APIs.
thx
Hey, I’m new to TSM and have started getting my feet wet in material flipping.
I don’t quite understand what you mean by ” I do this so I can quickly check if there are any massive inventories posted between my max shopping price and minimum auctioning price. If someone has 100+ stacks of 200 at 113% then I probably won’t be buying.”
What does the 113% have to do with your min auctioning price? You can’t see it in the shopping list can you?
Could you elaborate in a bit more detail please?
Thank you for your guides!
I’d assume he just means if someone has a huge surplus they’re trying to sell at about the price he would flip for, he doesn’t buy any. Probably not worth the hassle to be competing with someone who has a huge surplus.
My minimum auctioning price would show up in the shopping scan results list as 125%. So if there are thousands and thousands of a specific item posted at a price between my maximum shopping price and my minimum auctioning price then the item will probably go down in price, and the probability that I can make gold flipping that material right now is very low, so I want to avoid it until the massive farmer runs out and the price stabilizes.