More thoughts on business

Business in WoW is just like business in real life - the basic action is to buy low and sell high.

If I can buy 10 Crystallized Fire (in the form of an Eternal) for 25 gold and sell the individual CF's for 5 gold or 50 gold for 10, I've just bought low and sold high.

If I can buy the Ardent Defender for 5 gold and sell it for 88 gold, I've just bought low and sold high.

If I can buy 4 Saronite bars, and 1 each of Eternal Water, Shadow, and Earth for approximately 40 gold and sell the Eternal Belt Buckle I make out of it for 60 gold, I've just bought low and sold high.

And finally, if I can buy 120 Borean leather for 48 gold and sell the 20 Heavy Borean leather in stacks of 4 @ 20 gold each, I've just bought low and sold high.

Now, you might say, but Rusty, you used your professions to transmute/manufacture/whatever the item to something of higher value. And I would agree with you for the latter two examples. But the first two are available to even my level one bank toon.

Ok, ok, the real focus of this entry is to emphasis the first part of the equation - buy low.

I'm doing pretty well in the Eternal Belt Buckle business, and I plan on working it long term. As such, I try to keep an eye out for cheap mats to keep my costs down. If I can get my costs down below 40 gold, more profit for me!

I am also trying to keep at least a stack of each of the mats in my bank so I can make the belt buckles whenever I need them. This allows me to ride out any spikes in the markets that come from patches, new PvP seasons, and the like.

So the previous two concepts put together means I look at the prices of all three Eternals as well as Saronite (bars and ore) on a daily basis. If mats below my preset cost for them and I don't already have my preset inventory level for them, I buy them for future belt buckles.

Of course, I'll have a bit of money tied up in inventory, but as I'm experiencing currently, you can't sell what you don't have the mats to make. For some reason, Eternal Waters on my server have shot up to unreasonable (read unprofitable) levels, so I had to wait for the price to drop before I could make more Eternal Belt Buckles because I didn't keep enough waters on hand.

Lesson learned.