Background info: Critical's lives on Tichondrius (Horde).
Around January this year I took a punt and started selling DM cards for fun. At that time I was converting all BF and IF inks into cards. Later at around Faire 5 (May) I started keeping all my cards and sold trinkets instead. I also started glyphs around that time.
Every time Critical reads a comment or forum post where the author complains DM cards/trinkets dont sell he laughs. They are either lying so that readers are discouraged from entering this lucrative market, or they are greedy and are still trying to sell at ridiculous last Faire's prices. Tsunami is still very high on a healer's trinket wish list and the other trinkets are fantastic 359 trinkets for alts, which rich mains have no issues splurging on.
Anyway Critical is not here to persuade you to make DM trinkets. I am only here to show you how well this market has been selling on my server for the past 9 months.
Faires 1 to 4 (January to April)
First up have a look at these 2 graphs where in the first 4 months I made and sold cards only. Focus on the bright green bars which indicate TOTALS.
In the first month (I believe this was also the very first Faire for Cata) I had sales of 500k (keeping in mind these are all after tax (less AH success fee) figures). My main customers would have been raiders wanting these new phat trinkets and were willing to spend up to 5k on their last card. Also remember these are only Sales figures not Profit. At that time I did not keep track of my Expenses and how much I was paying for herbs and lifes (well actually even now I still dont keep Expense records).
NB: the second graph just shows actual quantity of cards sold, in case anyone was interested in that. Again the bright green bars show TOTAL cards sold in that month. If you look at April you will notice I sold a total of around 275 cards but my Total Sales only accounted for around 190k. So I was selling alot of cards but Sales totals were down, which lead to ...
Faires 5 to 9 (May to September)
This is the point where I took another punt and went all in and gave trinket-only selling a try. As you can see from these two graphs, trinkets sell well to raiders that need my sparkly sparklies.
Conclusion
Darkmoon trinkets, even this late in the expansion as recent as last month, still account for a few 100k worth of sales. Don't sell cards, don't sell infernos. Make love (and trinkets) not war. Well actually do make war, with the other scummy glyphers.
I release these dataz because as part of my gold purge/reset experiment I gave away all my infernos, cards, decks and lifes. Critical wont be selling trinkets this Faire. So go nuts ya'll.
Phew, extracting 9 months worth of raw mysales data aint as fun as it sounds. Thanks for making it to the end of this post.
Disclaimer: Critical opinion is his own and does not represent Foo management.
Posts
Thanks Critical Goblin.
ReplyDeleteCritical Goblin runs his own website at criticalgoblin.blogspot.com
I am upfront about deleted comments.
ReplyDeleteI have a low tolerance for gold selling comments, and have permanently deleted one from this post.
I want you to make gold; not buy it.
The comment the cards dont sell doesnt mean someone is not telling there version. I found on my server that selling cards was not the best way to make gold. Sure they sold but the amount of gold made given the competition just didnt make it a great way to make gold. Now supplying the card makers with inferno ink and continuing to sell my glyphs.....that was way more effective. In fact I can still sell the inferno ink fairly easily.
ReplyDeleteI was in the card/deck market for 3-4 months....Sales happened....made gold....but it was paltry vs the glyph market and the inferno ink sales.
Now, I like seeing your data. I like seeing how your sales went. The real deciding factor is was it worth it? Is there any way you can guess how much you were making? Was your liquid gold going up a lot....or was it impacted by your reinvesting.
@Brent Was it worth it? Yes but not for the gold stash that I ended up with, that I always end up giving away every time I "quit". It was useful as a Deny-Profitable-Products tactic.
ReplyDeleteWhen I switched to trinkets (and at the same time started glyphs) my objective was to find out: Is it possible to drive out all glyph competition and after that maintain a monopoly?
Glyphs is the goose that lays the the golden eggs. Infernos, DM cards and trinkets are a unavoidable by-product. Aggressively selling 50-90 trinkets and undercutting competition by 300-500g continuously during prime after-faire periods devalues DM trinkets. This tactic in turn devalues DM cards, which in turn devalues infernos. This is half of the inscription game.
Now imagine also hammering this poor scribe with low glyph floors and ceilings. Ouch.
So back to the point. The initial purpose was to sell DM trinkets at super competitive price points preferably at a loss to make the darkmoon market look unprofitable therefore convincing more scribes to quit. The unintended side-effect was they ended up being actually semi-profitable sales.
I've done this calc before but I'll do it again to demonstrate the semi-profitabilityness of trinkets using Tich values.
Lets look at September. Roughly I sold around 55 trinkets for a total of 240,000g averaging 4,360g per trinket.
Trinket cost = (10x infernos + 30x lifes) x 8
Trinket cost = (10x 35g + 30x 5g) x 8
Trinket cost = 4,000g
So an average profitability of only 360g per trinket. Pretty lame. But this lameness is excellent for driving out scribes.
So there u go, now u know Critical has a heart of gold (not the good type, the cold metallic type). Critical's blog is about winning. If u dont like receiving hate mail from competitors crying about how u are ruining their market ... dont say I didnt warn u.
Just to make sure...are you selling the trinket or the deck?
ReplyDeleteTrinkets. Guildies used to do the hand-ins for me for free rep.
ReplyDeleteFoo, this is Appledeath, at this stage i am unable to access Wow in any form, and as such wont be at the raid tomorro, just an FYI, i might be there, but doubtful...
ReplyDelete