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Friday, February 8, 2013

How to Price Items to Sell!

Marko's "Nothings Sells and Nobody Buys Anything" article got my attention, and I realised I hadn't posted here in months. So here is my 2 cents worth on how I price my farmed, and not very good, items to sell. Turnover is key to making gold in Diablo 3, not that single big ticket item you dream of finding while doing runs or flipping. This is the way to make gold while just playing the game with no real market knowledge required or niche markets to try and corner!

While doing runs the majority of what you find is frankly garbage - case in point the boots I did a search similar for in the AH:
They have all the key ingredients for a pair of non-set Monk or Demon Hunter boots, but obviously don't even come closeto the Billion+ ramges we see with an unfiltered Search.

My potential buyer is a newly dinged Monk that is probably someones alt. They aren't going to be spending 1,000,000,000 per item gearing this new character, they just want the basics to make a start on Inferno. Dex, Vit, All Res, and Movement Speed. Anyone who has played a Monk or Demon Hunter should understand the basic stat requirements for each class, without having to get into the depth of IAS or crit benchmarks and which is better Acrhon or CM Wizards for example, or whether a piece without IAS will be potentially better for certain popular Witch Doctor builds.

None of the are stats are particularly high for this item, but they are at least all there, so I expect to do significantly better than vendor or salvage, if I can get it sold FAST. So my price needs to be bottom dollar to sell quickly and not sit for a day and a half clogging up one of my 10 slots just to return to my stash.

Lets see what our buyer can get in the 1,000,000 and below price range:
Note I've sorted by Dexterity as this is the main factor I belive will affect my potential buyers choice of footwear in a given price range. Only include those stats that your potential buyer (the newly dinged monk whats/needs to enter inferno and maybe enable mp1-mp3. He is not looking for life regen, exp, gold/magic find, thorns etc. and all the other junk stats which while nice won't help him past the difficulty barriers ahead.

Ok, we are getting closer with all those 160ish dex boots, but mine are only 154 so let's try 500,000:
Ok, now we are in the ball bark, however there are 2 things to note here:
1: Our items stats are the minimum for the search so lets consider our search parameters, I'm lowering dex to 100 (30% lower) for the next search to see what I'm competing with while keeping the remaining stats the same.
2: I want to sell fast, so I need to significantly undercut the competition, which here 300,000 will get my buyer better boots all around.
So after all of about 1min I have my final search. I'm seeing boots with less Dex but the same or more Vit, AR, and Movement speed for 100,000g, 150,000g and 2 at 200,000g so I listed mine at 150,000g

I listed these right after logging in my newly freed up slots and they sold within the 2 hours I was playing and gathering more similar items that I used the same methods to list at the end of my play session.

I play on average 2 hours a night or less, about 3-4 nights a week, have not parted with any of my own money on the RMAH, although have turned over my battle net balance a couple times in gold and gear buying and selling to kit out my characters.

Feel free to contact me in game on Kurllkrum#1929. I am currently focusing on Hardcore leveling all five classes by "leapfrogging" which I intend to share with my readers in a subsequent post. Currently lvl 35-40 on each class with 2 tragic deaths of Demon Hunters!