How to improve your battle pet goldmaking
Learn how to improves your sales in the pet market as well as other markets! Upscale your world of warcraft pet sales with data driven methods in this blog post.
GOLDMAKING
How to sell pets
The pet market and the transmog market are probably the most abandoned markets ever. When leaving, they blame the markets for being bad and that items like pets don’t sell. While some items can take a very long time to sell, there are ways to increase the flow of sales in a substantial manner.
Nevertheless, plenty will quit. What I’m suggesting today isn’t miracle work. It’s tangible data to help you get sales. With a little patience, wonderful things can happen in goldmaking. Here is a nice quote that reflects my thoughts.
Understanding sale rates
Definition of sale rate : When an item is posted, the sale rate is the % of times the item will sell on average. A 0.021 sale rate means the item will sell 2.1% of the time ( according to data from tsm ).
TSM: Tsm is an acronym for the addon tradeskillmaster. Tsm is a powerful goldmaking addon.
It’s important to know what you are getting into when you select an item that you want to sell. An item at 0.010 sale rate will take 100 posts on average to sell. Do you have this much patience? Is it worth it for the price?
A good way to know how many times you would need to post an item for a sale is to divide “1” by the number you see on the region sale rate tooltips. For example, 1 divided by 0.021 would give you about 47. This means you would need to post the item 47 times on average for it to sell. This might seem like too much but as we’ll see, there are ways to augment the volume of posts we can do every day.
Improving the sale rate with multiple posts
Looking at the previous example, you can see it would take 47 posts to sell the item on average. If you post it once per day, it would take you 47 days for a sale. However, if you post at 12 hours when you wake up and repost before you go to bed, it would now take you 23.5 days to sell the item.
If you play a lot, “cancel scanning” might also be an option. “Cancel scanning” is a tsm feature to check if the items you posted got undercutted. Other addons have similar features and you can technically do it manually but for this article, we will focus on the tsm version.
The goal behind cancel scanning
When an item is posted, it has a much higher chance of getting a sale. That’s because when a customer clicks the buy button, it will sell the most recent item posted when multiple items are at the same price. If you post a pet and someone posts it after you, the chance of 2 pets selling is very unlikely compared to one pet being sold. Someone undercutting you effectively reduced your sale rate.
Tsm will show you an item at a 5% sale rate. The reality is that the same item can be at a 20% sale rate when it’s the first one up and to less than 1% when it’s not. This is why cancel scanning can bring back the sale rate of the item to a much higher sale rate. It comes at the cost of your time!
Should you cancel scan every item? NO! The best way to use cancel scanning is to apply it on items that can be restocked easily. Selling a pet that you can’t restock doesn’t need to be sold faster. Cancel scanning doesn’t create gold. It increases the flow of sales.
My recommendation is to use cancel scanning in moderation. In the example where you post when you wake up and when you go to bed, you could get a third post by cancel scanning when you come back from work for example. It’s up to you to decide. The more you cancel scan, the less effective it becomes.
Selling on multiple realms
Pets are cageable on any realm. To increase the amount of posts, you can list your pets on as many servers as you can manage. You don’t need multiple accounts for this. You just need a little gold to be able to post pets. It only costs 1 silver to put a pet on the auction house.
If you are stuck with gold on a server that you don’t want to play, you can either buy wow tokens or pets that you can then sell on your main realm. However, it will not be a problem for very long as warbands will let you manage your gold on any realm now!
Selecting realms
On lower pops, prices are higher but you get less sales. On higher pops, you get more sales but at a lower price. You’ll need to decide where you want to invest your time. I personally like a mix of servers but you can decide whatever you prefer. If you would consider yourself impatient, a full pop is the way to go.
Gold per post
When I kill rares for pets, I like to use the “gold per kill” metric. If a pet is worth 50000 gold and has a 10% chance to drop, I get an average of 5000 gold every time I kill this rare.
It’s the same thing with posting on the auction house. If an item is worth 1000 gold and has a 10% chance to sell, I make an average of 100g per post.
This is the best way to decide what is worth posting. Determine your price. Are you ok with posting 1000 auctions at an average price of 10 gold per post? If you can post 1000 auctions in 30 minutes, you would gain 20000 gold per hour from posting your auctions.
Now don’t be fooled. You still need time to acquire those 1000 items. This is why I vendor most transmog items. Transmog usually has 1% or 2% chance to sell. That would give me 10 to 20 gold per post for a 1000 gold item and that’s just not good enough for me.
This is very relevant when it comes to choosing what you sell on the auction house. Do you want to farm valuable items or do you prefer spending hours posting garbage at the auction house? Is your goal to make sales or is your goal to make the most amount of gold in the least amount of time? Do you want to spend your time posting or farming?
The level and quality of pets
As we have seen before, when you get undercutted, your auction has a much lower chance to sell. There is another big factor when it comes to sale rate. The level and quality of pets.
The tsm sale rate is combined for all versions of the caged pets. They show the same sale rate for a lvl 1 uncommon quality pet as a lvl 25 rare quality pet. Even though it is showing the same, it is definitely not the same!
In the image above, you see the same pet being posted 7 times at a very similar price. However, only 3 of them have a real chance to sell. For the same price, you can have a better version of the pet. Leveling your pets and upgrading them just cut your competition in half which naturally improves your sale rate.
In a previous article, I talked about leveling pets with polished pet charms to make gold. Something I didn’t mention is that I only sell level 25 pets. It takes me 30 seconds to level a pet with 18 polished pet charms. As I get about 2000 charms per week from one hour of gameplay, I could level over 100 pets per week.
I’m not saying that level 1 pets don’t sell. However, they have no chance to sell if someone posts the same pet for the same price at level 25 which makes them very hard to sell.
How much are your pets worth?
The addon rematch tsm pet values helps you see the prices of all your pets. The first price is the price on your realm while the second price is the region market price. You will need tsm and rematch for the addon to work.
Tsm operations for pets
I have made 2 different operations for selling pets. Here they are on the second page of my polished pet charms spreadsheet.
The first one is the safe one ( the one I personally use ). If you feel like it should undercut and doesn’t, you can use the risky operation. I call it risky because you will undercut people that post it for below the region sale average.
I really hope this article was helpful. Remember that even with all those tips, it takes time to sell pets. Patience will go a very long way when it comes to goldmaking. Nevertheless, the feeling of getting big ticket items sold is astounding. If you enjoy the pet market, make sure to check out my previous article about polished pet charms!
