Pricing - My glyph making process - part 2 of 4

This is part 2 of a set of posts

For pricing and posting glyphs, I use an addon Trade skill master, both the base addon, and the auctioning extension.  A guide exists at JMTC.  While I will talk about automation later, this addon allows me to post all my glyphs very very quickly - doing pricing and posting of 120 different glyphs in a few minutes.

In essence I am going to start of listing all glyphs using the same pricing strategy.  I pay very little attention to any given glyph, but a lot of attention to the entire list.

Using Tradeskill Master (or TSM), there are some numbers that are important to me: Minimum Price, Maximum Price, and Undercut.  Grouping similar items with the same pricing strategy is also incredibly valuable.

I have a few glyphs that I want to sell.  (Ok I have every glyph and I want to sell them all, but Moonvengence happens).

In the first instance, I will use TSM to create a group and put all my glyphs into it. (The guide above will help).

For the purpose of this post, we are not doing any milling, and only buying blackfallow inks of the AH, converting them to lower value inks.  (Both assumptions are incorrect - but I will cover that in later posts.  It however does capture your maximum pricing).  Alliance Caelestrasz is full of blackfallow ink for around 7g each (I use unit pricing - not pricing per stack).  It takes 3 inks + 1 parchment to make a glyph, and we will assume resilient parchment (55s).  There is also ah AH cut of 5%, plus your time. This leaves a base cost per glyph of roughly (7*3g + 55s) * 105% or 22.7g.  Because my time is not free - even if I do make a sale, I will call my minimum price 24g.  In TSM's terms this is a threshold.

I will have a look at the the Auction house, seeing what the maximum prices glyphs are being sold for.  On some servers, it will be 80g.  If your scribes are lazy or have insufficient competition, it might be 200g.  On my auction house it is 33g.  I will call my maximum price 33g, as I won't make sales above that price.  Most other servers, and even our Horde AH has a higher price than that.  In TSM's terms, this is a fallback.

The cheapest glyph (of a given type) that is on the market when a buyer comes knocking is the one that sells.  There are exceptions, but they only serve to prove the rule.  Buyers come knocking - when you are on, and when you are not.  Ideally, you will be the cheapest regardless of when someone buys glyphs.  Reality is not idealistic.  So, I now need to decide how much to undercut someone else's auctions.  An older post by Gevlon describes Monopolists (buys out everything below a price) vs campers (constantly sniping you with 1c uncercuts) vs deep undercutters (price setters driving others out of the market) vs random sellers.

 It would be nearly impossible to profitably run with monopolist pricing - especially on our server, (I think that is another way of saying 'Bring it on').  Camping isn't my style.  (A) I am not on during the day, and (b) when I am on, I would rather be doing 'stuff'.  At the moment with a 7g range of prices, I am using a 1g undercut. With an 80g 'fallback' above, I would use a 5g undercut.  Others will set this according to their own strategies and price ranges. 

TSM has other options to play with, but to me, none are imortant as common pricing among a set of items, set a minimum/maximum price, and an undercut.  It is also fast.  You can post with different addons, or even addon free, as your time commitments allow.

Things to consider once you have the basics:

• Split glyphs into different groups (sells well, sells poor; or by ink type)
• Change durations, undercuts and pricing. 
• Change number of glyphs posted.
• Posting on the faction's AH
• Selling inks as well as glyphs (on markets where glyphs are very cheap)