Companion Pets - Super Cute and Selling Well!

Today's guest post was written by Power Word: Gold reader and commenter Torgal. Torgal enjoys gold-making and raiding. His main strategy is diversifying into many niche markets. He plays on an EU-Server and can be reached via email at smv666@gmx.de. 

"Oh look honey they're so cute! - Yes, darling and they are selling!"

With Patch 4.1 there are now two new pet-related achievements: Petting Zoo for collecting 100 companion pets and Menagerie for collecting 125. How can we as gold-makers profit from the increased demand for companion pets (AKA mini-pets, vanity pets)? Find out after the jump.

An Idea Is Born
As I was looking for pets to complete the achievement myself I stubled upon a very usefull site called warcraftpets.com. This site has an almost complete database of all the pets available in the game. It also features a search function that filters out those which are vendored by NPCs.

Browsing through the list I found out that many of them do not require any reputation or daily quest grinding but are sold for a few silver to a few gold. A quick check on my local auction house showed that most of them were listed 100% to 100,000% above the vendor price (or weren't even listed at all).

My main goals when exploring new market segments are low risk, high profit margins and low time investment. All my points are matched perfectly here.

In just a few minutes I created a list of NPC vendors that sell these pets and started to calculate the quickest route between them. The best class to perform all the gathering is a level 85 mage (because of their extremely useful teleport ability).

Visiting the "Crazy Cat Lady" to buy...well...cats.

The Route
My route starts at Breanni in Dalaran because it's the homebase for my enchanting twink. (Auctionator keeps disconnecting me from the game while I'm scannig in a crowded place like Stormwind and a location as remote as Dalaran works pretty good.)

(Blizzard reopened the portal from Dalaran to Stormwind in World of Warcraft Patch 4.1 so any character can use my route as well.)

Next stops are Donni Anthania the Crazy Cat Lady in Elwynn Forest and Narrk in Booty Bay who are only a short flight away from Stormwind.

Pets ready to sell.

From there you can either teleport directly to Shattrath or use the portal in blasted lands to get to Outland. Here we take a little 3 Minute afk-flight to Stormspire in Netherstorm and pay Dealer Rashaad a visit. From there hearth back to Stormwind.

The last two dealers are Shylenai in Darnassus (ship from Stormwind) and Michelle De Rum in Everlook/Winterspring (Portal from SW to Hyjal). The later sells a Winterspring Cub which is new in Patch 4.1 and the demand for it is huge right now.

(An alternative to flying is parking alts at the more remote vendors to save even more time.)

After you collect the pets simply mail them to your auctioning alt. As you have probably already noticed my little guide is almost exclusive for alliance players (sorry horde buddies). But with warcraftpets.com you can develop your own personal pet shopping tour in just a few minutes.

The Fun Part: Selling
A few thoughts on selling these pets. Remeber that supply and demand regulate prices. You don't want to flood the AH with tons of vendor pets.

This market is based on the lack of knowledge and/or lazyness of the average player. I only ever list one pet of each type at once. This way they stay "rare" or even "sold out" most of the time which keeps their price ridiculously high compared to your deposit costs. It doesn't attract competitors that may get the impression there is a quick buck to be made.

I'd recommend to start small by buying only one or two each this way you can get a feeling for this particular market on your server (and minimize the risk of sitting on lots of stuff that is not moving).

You will notice some are moving faster than others. When you are familiar with it you'll automaticaly buy the right quantities. I've integrated my tour in my weekly routine and therefore it only takes me 15 minutes a week to make hundreds (or thousands) of gold.

You can even try to sell some faction exclusive pets in the opposing factions Auction house for even bigger profits.

My current companion pets on the auction house.

The addons I use are Auctionator for listing and Altoholic for keeping track of how many pets of each type I have left in store.

If you're using TradeSkillMaster you could easily set up an auctioning group to speed up the posting and re-posting. I only relist one or twice a day because the competition on my server is realy low to non-existant most of the time.

Conclusion
Selling vendor pets is a simple and fast way to make gold with minimum risk involved. It makes enough money to support a full raiding week and can be done mostly afk.

You can do it in addition to your other gold-making techniques or use it to get into gold-making. Check warcraftpets.com to create your personal shopping list that works best on your server and faction.

Don't be scared if some items aren't selling for a few days. Remember you paid next-to-nothing to obtain them. As a nice side effect you may keep one of each to have some cute little companions on your way through Azeroth ;-)

-Torgal

Talking Points

• How is the competition and prices on your server?
• Which companion pets are selling best for you?
• Which companion pets did I forgot to mention? Cross-faction?

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