What Mistakes Have You Learned From While Playing the AH?

What a busy week! Markco & Zuggy are both running a carnival soon, and I've decided to participate in both. I will post Markco's Carnival Question today, and Zuggy's on Sunday. Thank you both for letting me participate in such an awesome event.

Markco's Blog Carnival

What Mistakes Have You Learned From While Playing the AH?

Oh boy.. what mistakes...? A whole bunch of mistakes... from learning how to control markets, to learning how to NOT spend too much and have little to no income come back.... I've learned so much, and to be honest, I haven't made too many mistakes, but the ones I have made have costed me quite a bit.

The most recent one was spending roughly 5k on epic gem materials... I thought that the Alchemy Transmute cooldown was going to be removed with patch 4.0.1... and that completely burned me out, I had 5,000g worth of almost useless materials that just sat there. I managed to get rid of most of the stock, but still I came out losing roughly 1,000g, it's not much but I was hoping that the initial 5k investment would double itself, and I was VERY disappointed.

Another mistake I've made before is buy a couple items too high that are hard to flip. In most cases the item took weeks to sell ( Haunted Mementos... omg you can't get rid of these! )... or in other cases I've sold a couple items for way too low and then realized this and asked myself.... could I have of gotten more? But in all honesty, mistakes are mistakes, if you can't sell this item or that item, don't worry about it, just keep trying and eventually it will sell, someone is out there wanting that specific item, you just need to have patience ( which I have little when it comes to selling high ticket items ). Patience is the key.

Controlling markets.... I suggest you don't even try this. It takes a LOT of gold to control a market and if you are not careful, you WILL burn yourself out. About 5 or 6 months ago, I was the go to man to get cheap flasks, I had a farmer supplying me, and I could sell flasks for cheaper then anyone could. That was until my farmer took off. At that point, I still had a nice supply ( about 2 weeks worth ) and I managed for a little while, after I ran out I started buying the materials off the Auction house, it was profitable but I wasn't happy. I asked around my competition and asked if I could buy their flasks for a little below market value ( 3-4g ) and most of them agreed, I was back in business, man was I wrong. I dumped roughly 20k on cheap flasks ( 17g back then, Market Value was roughly 23-25g )... only to log in the next night to find flasks at an all time low of 12g. They sat there for weeks... they never rose, and they still haven't. I lost 45% of my initial investment on this.... I later found out that my farmer, went to my competition, and he was selling me the flasks that costed him 12g to craft for a little under Market Value.... That really burned me out. I don't recommend to anyone to try to control a specific market, at all, even if you have the gold, it's VERY easy for someone to come and use the Walmart approach ( selling more at low prices ) and totally burn you out.

I guess the point of this post is that, yeah I make mistakes, but it's important that you learn from them and don't make the same mistake again.