How to Get Cheap Herbs and Other Materials For Less

Posted on 2009 under WoW Gold Tips | Comments are off

30 Dec

As with any business your profits come from the difference between sales price and cost of materials (hopefully the sales price being higher).

The lower you can get your material costs will not only increase your earnings but it will enable you more room to undercut your competition to the point that they may be going into the negative from their high mat costs while you are still maintaining a profit. Some competitors are too stubborn and will even continue crafting in the negative so I stick to Luke’s guide to make my most gold.

Here are methods I use to bring my crafting material costs as low as possible:

1. Use Auctionator to buy from the Auction House

Auctinonator is an addon from the auction house which saves your most recent item searches and allows you to set up “shopping lists”. The greatest benefit comes when you click on an item in your shopping list, it will scan every auction for that item and automatically sort by lowest price “per unit” while showing the stack price to the right.

This speeds up purchasing because you can type in how many stacks you want to buy at those price points and it will buy them way faster than clicking each auction item in the window. GreenGuts posted a great guide on how to use auctionator go check it out.

2. Buy From The Middle

As you purchase materials off of the auction house you are obviously buying the cheapest priced mats per unit until you either have enough stock or the prices get too high for your set costs/profit levels.

What ends up happening is after your buying session the prices may have gone from 75 silver per Adder’s Tongue up to 90 silver. When someone goes to post more Adder’s they will most likely undercut the lowest current price by a copper or silver, which is now 90s, so their posting price will be 89s per.

To keep prices low, purchase the 2nd lowest price, so if there is a 75s per and then a 76s per, buy the 76s to 90s, while leaving the 75s auction up so that anyone posting their mats will automatically undercut that 75s auction that is still up meanwhile the next auction is all the way up to 90s each.

3. Hire a Farmer

Usually where I get most of my supply is by hiring farmers and gatherers to COD me their herbs at an agreed upon price.

After a while you get a feeling for your servers prices of different mats and how low they will go in a week and how high. Take the lowest average and message farmers saying you will buy out all their stock for that much at all times.

For example: Adder’s Tongue goes between 1g each down to 75s each on a given day, Msg people who you see posting large amounts of Adder’s Tongue and offer to buy out all their stock any time for 75s each. If you find your stock is getting higher and higher week by week because you aren’t crafting enough or selling enough end product, simply lower your price down to 70s each.

The value for the farmer is that they don’t have to waste time posting on the AH and hoping that they sell, they can instantly send it to you COD then go back to playing the game.

The best way I found to find farmers is to either use Beancounter (a feature in auctioneer) sort by most recent date, it will show the names of all the sellers you bought that particular item from and how much. Add the lowest priced sellers to your friends list and when they log on send them a message with your prices. Another method is to just add someone to your friends list if they ever post mats you need for low prices and offer to buy them.

I like to set notes in my friends list with the agreed upon amounts, also I’ll write in if they disagreed so I won’t bother them in the future.

Bonus: Sometimes you’ll message a farmer and they speak a chinese language (most likely a gold farmer) here is a list of chinese to english phrases to communicate with these farmers and set up trade deals

4. Always Keep Backup Inventory

As we all know prices for items go through cycles during the week, from shortages to surplus depending on peak times and demand for those items. If you are only buying enough mats to cover your daily crafting needs you will be screwed if one day someone decided they needed to buy out all available stock leaving prices at 2x the amount, you will be crafting at a loss if you buy them or just have to skip out on sales for the day.

Keep a comfortable inventory level of your most needed mats, depending on your available funds, I like to keep 3 days worth of adder’s tongue and ink of the sea.

What this enables you to do is skip out buying mats on days where the prices are above the average, and stock up excess inventory when there are tons of supply being loaded onto the auction house. Access your weekly stock week by week and adjust your buying price accordingly, if you find you are gaining more and more inventory as the weeks go by consider lowering your buying price or raising it if you are having shortages.

5. Use Trade Chat

This one is straight forward, some of the best deals you’ll find are people looking to quickly liquidate their inventory in trade chat, you can most likely even negotiate them lower per unit if you are buying in mass quantity.

Set up a macro you can use while you’re crafting looking for materials, you’ll never know who’s looking to buy and may even get a new farmer to set up a constant supply with you at your set price.

6. Use the Snatch Feature

I’ll admit that I do not utilize this feature yet but it is a HUGE time saver, especially if you are procuring multiple items.

The Snatch feature (a part of Auctioneer) allows you to make a list of items you want to buy and at what price you are willing to buy them at. When you do a search with snatch after you put in your items and the prices it will return all of those items currently on the auction house listed below the price you have set.

Sarainy has posted a great guide on how to use the snatch feature and youtube video, check it out if you are interested in this feature.

Utilize these methods to get your crafting materials at lower prices to not only increase your profits but to have more flexibility to undercut and compete with other crafters who are looking to take away a piece of your market. Be sure to check out Luke’s Guide which I use to generate my most gold an hour when I’m not doing inscription.

Enjoyed this post? subscribe to the rss to be notified when the next article is released.