Middlecutting in the Glyph Market

Interesting flux, very interesting....

I really don't see the great profitability in this, as you are just killing potential profits by just undercutting by say, 1g in the first place...

I guess my take is: If someone needs that glyph, they don't care if it's 200g or 77g. They will pay the lowest price. If you undercut to 199g instead of 77g, they will buy yours. Either way. It's not that you are seeing more sales from glyphs, they would have sold either way..You are just the lowest seller, so it's deceiving...

Although this is a good post, and I want to agree, my experience tells me not to. I can see one situation where it is feasable: if you want to sell three times the glyphs to reach the profit of selling one. The problem is, there is only X amount of glyph sales a day, and not XXX.

This is not making more people buy glyphs by lowering the price, it's just dropping the overall "value". Right?

@Altolycus This isn't about profit. It's about pissing the other guy off. ;)

@Altolycus To explain a bit further you are correct on all counts. This isn't a regular glyph profit making strategy.

This is an attempt to see at least some sales in a market saturated with higly motivated and dedicated competition.

I moved out of the high volume glyph market but cant help but continue to experiment and poke around in it. More as a learning experience than a hardcore competition.

Who knows maybe I should just jump back in swinging. :)

Since I started using TSM, I have dived deeper than ever into the glyph market - your strategy wouldn't really annoy me initially because I have my minimum prices set & I just cancel & relist blindly within those parameters - I wouldn't even see your individual glyphs.

Having said that, if you went below my minimums, I would be left with a bag full of unposted glyphs (my TSM is set to not post below my min) then I would look at them - that's where my post came from last Friday :) So I guess it might take me a little longer to notice but hopefully, you'd have sold your cheap glyphs & moved on! lol

I've recently leveled inscription to 525 because of the outrageous glyph prices on my server. Since I did the work to get to 525, I figured I'd get into the glyph market to see if I could make some extra gold. I'm not a gold guru by any stretch of the imagination (consistently sit around 120k)and do fairly well peddling gems, belt buckles, and enchanting mats.

I like the annoyance factor involved with your plot. However, on my server, not too sure if it would be effective. Undercutting is fierce and many times doesn't have any rhyme or reason.

I will, however, give this a shot. Thanks for a great article.

I can't see how that's profitable, but I do understand that you want to annoy your competition.

However, glyphs are possibly one of the worst markets to do that, since people are dragging prices "to the ground" all the time even when there's nobody helping them. :P

Most of my comment got eaten by blogger :(

Summary - If you aren't doing it for profit, don;t bother. From my own experience as a "big time" glyph seller on my own server, I wouldn't even notice what you are doing, by the sound of things. You would need to really increase the scale in order to make any significant impact, and that would take way more time that it would be worth, imo.

I actually did this on my server, driving prices down from 700somethings to 75-100, and inscription has since become one of the main profit sources for me as opposed to a non sales profession.

I don't really know why this works. At the beginning I just did it out of spite for my competitors, but it seems to keep working. Probably some people are not willing to undercut me too much, or not all of them, or not everyone was willing to buy a glyph that costed 700g

I took a chance on this, since I'm a small-time glyph seller unable to beat the competition when trying to sell at market rates. So, for those glyphs price 40g or higher (some up to 300g), I simply listed them at 50% of the going rate. Most of them have sold within the last day, giving me the gold I wouldn't otherwise get from them (only 1k; like I said, I'm small-time), and still making me a decent profit.

As it is, I am considering giving up relying on the Inscription market for gold making, there's just too much dedicated competition and I'm not rich enough to start competing with them.

Flux,

"Who knows maybe I should just jump back in swinging."

You said it better than I could have. There is too much profit in glyphs no matter if you are a novice or a pro.

I think it was Nev that hit on it, TSM for glyphs is sooo easy. I was very hesitant at first, but after I finially set it up (thanks in part to her) I saw that it auto deletes any glyph you were undercut on and leaves the ones with no competition. I have saved so much time since then, I wish I would have started earlier.

Here is my post with links to both Nev and Zoxy's "how to's":

TSM and Alto- Friends at last

Hahahahahahahahaha, I had this exact same idea a month or so ago! It's fun to see bloggers think alike. I was so fed up with constantly being undercut and having to cancel/repost 4 times a day just to make any profit that I went in to TSM and made about 2 of every glyph posted above 200g, and relisted at 100g. I honestly just wanted to get some hate-mail. I don't think it had much effect though, as I just got blindly undercut, as Nev pointed out. I did see a nice spike in sales though, and actually made a decent amount from this tactic. Whether this was due specifically to people seeing "cheap" glyphs and buying them, or whether it was just because I may have been selling the more popular glyphs is a mystery to me. But it was still a moderately enjoyable experience, and I might try it out on a grander scale some time in the future.

Like you said though, this tactic isn't about profit, it's about fun and striking back at a rather infuriating market. Granted, you're still probably making profit, though not as much. And you might end up making this profitable if you can annoy your competition so much they drop out, allowing you to retake the glyph market!

I actually like doing this. I don't sell in volumes and spend lots of times on the AH so I don't have time to cancel/undercut battle.

I find that some items I will relist several times and relisting ends up spending some G on auction fees each time for no sale.
As a result I find if you severely cut the price you may not make as big a profit as if you had waited and relisted for a while. But you don't eat X amount of posting fees and you usually sell within 24h.

Better sell for cheaper profit than not sell at all.