Today I'm talking about the co-operative sellor.When it works, you can make a fortune. Some of the items below would be of questionable legatilty in many western countries. Today, we are fleecing the buyers instead of other sellers.
In my last post on this I talked about defecting in different ways.
- Undercutting (even by one copper), with special 'jerk' status applied to:
- Camping the AH, immediately undercutting new auctions
- Deep undercutting, pricing below thresholds.
- Posting with long durations
We know that defecting sends sales your way; but also encourages others to either defect or, if markets get too tight, to simply bail. Others bailing is good for you (increased sales per sellor); others defecting again in turn is bad for you. On our AH; buy co-operating; we are raising the prices, and potentially encouraging others to co-operate as well.
Seperate the market you are selling to. This can be seperated by time (I post in the morning; you post in the evening), or by product (I'll sell glyphs for the first 5 classes; you sell the rest). Time seperation is easiest to organise. Just don't post immedieately after them.
High thresholds and fallbacks are also nice. More money to whoever makes the sale.
Sometimes we will organise to 'whitelist' individuals that you are not going to compete with. In tradeskillmasters, you can explicitly mark players that you will match prices with. However, there is no need to undercut at all. You have all been in the first life shop that 'price matches' the competition.
I also post 12 hour auctions in busy markets; knowingly letting AH postings expire. This allows both others doing the same thing, and the cancel/undercutters to raise prices, so when you come back, there should be much higher sales prices.
Posts
I'm very curious; you (and perhaps others as well) have commented previously that 'posting with long duration' is effectively a hostile act. Can you explain the logic behind this?
ReplyDeleteMost auctions on my (medium-pop) realm, even by the larger sellers, seem to be for 48 hours; the people who post for 12 hours and re-post at intervals less than that when undercut are the ones with a poor reputation and who are seen as 'not playing kosher'.
Looking forward to an answer here, or separately in a full post.
@anon : I will make a full post soon(ish), on what I see the difference a 12 vs 48 hour post makes.
ReplyDeleteI play the AH in two different ways depending on the competition. If there are a lot of campers, I post large amounts with deep undercuts for 48 hours. This way I don't get caught up in camping as well and really pisses off the under cutters because I effectively set the ceiling for 3 days. If it's the usual competition, I post 3 gem cuts each for 12 hours and a 1c undercut.
ReplyDelete