Vendor Supplied Items

Let us address the Vendor Supplied Items. These items are generally useful to purchase from a vendor and re-sell on the auction house. When we consider the vendors in game maintain items that are for sale, it provides an additional source of products to list on the auction house.

What to buy

What items would be good to purchase from a vendor to place on the auction house? Here is a list of 10 types to start with.

1) Limited Vendor Supplied Items

2) Herbs

3) Ores

4) Pets

5) Cloth

6) Scrolls

7) Patterns

8) Schematics

9) Recipes

10) Leather

See the reoccurring theme here? Practically all the items on that list are required for crafting professions, and each one is most likely going to be available in a limited quantity. As each of the professions needs raw materials to grind up, all of these items are good for that, with one exception, pets. More on pets in a later post.

What not to buy

Now you are wondering. “Well what should I not buy off a vendor to sell on the auction house?” Conveniently enough here is a list of 10 items to not buy.

a) Unlimited Vendor Supplied Items

b) Reagents

c) Engineering Ink

d) Vellum

e) Wood

f) Thread

g) Vials

h) Common Spices

i) Armor

j) Weapons

I hear you now “But if the Armor and Weapons are a limited item shouldn’t I buy them?” The answer is, “No”. The listing fee, plus your purchase fee, will be far greater than you can actually expect to receive when auctioning the items. With the exception of Armor and Weapons the items in the list are unlimited in quantity and have very limited uses. Not to mention that all of them are available in every city and most towns in the world.

Gauging Salability  

Four criteria are to be considered when listing these items in the auction house.

a) Availability

Is the item already up on the auction house for less than you want to charge for it? If the answer is yes, don’t list the item.

b) Base Cost of the item

Is the price to purchase and list the item more than you expect to make in profit? If the answer is yes, don’t list the item better yet don’t buy that item.

c) Level to use the item

Is level of the item consistent with the amount you expect to charge?

If the answer is no, reduce the price or do not list the item.

d) Frequency

How often will the item you are selling appear on the auction house?

If your answer is, “it’s there everyday” don’t list the item.

So at this point you have determined that you have items that are going to sell. What should you charge for them? How will you know you are making the most of your investment? Simple, if you make 100% of the cost of the item pulse the listing fee you have made a profit. So if the item costs you 25 silver and you sell it for 50 silver you make a profit of 25 silver. It is conceivable that you can charge more for an item, for price suggestions there are several sites with dedicated data bases for the game. I recommend wowhead.com .

Ramifications of Selling Vendor supplied Items

A segment of the gaming population disagrees with the selling of vendor items. There is nothing you can do about that. You are servicing the people that are not interested in making the trip out to the vendors you farm. They are the ones that are going to buy your products. The funny part is that these are some of the same people that will give you grief for selling the vendor items.

Here are some good results that come from selling the vendor items. More availability of the items in a larger section of the population leads to more demand for resources. Better distribution of the items in the general population. And of course you will make your profit and that’s why you play a banker.

Several unpleasant behaviors develop from this practice as well. Vendors with items that are in relatively high demand are camped, sometimes by bots. This makes it hard for non-bankers to get the same products. These bots can snatch the items you are trying to buy while you are trying to buy them, it has happened to me on more than one occasion.

Then of course there is the dumping of vendor items on the auction house in an effort to destroy the market. Some times this has a side effect of making the items cheaper to buy off the auction house than from the original vendor... Yes there are stupid bankers.