Meet Ohnekase: Money making through vendors.

Meet Ohnekase.

Maiev, US

We have been talking about making money through professions.  These are a great way to make money.  Today, we are going to talk about making money without actually doing any real work.  Instead, we are going to run around, buy stuff from vendors, then sell them on the Auction House.

In this dimension, Ohnekase was born to a merchant father and mother.  They worked out of Razor Hill and would buy and sell anything people would give them.  You know all those grey items you sell to merchants.  Ohnekase's parents had uses for them.  Ruined Scraps, they could turn into cloth.  Random animal parts, they sold to Taxidermists or made into cheap leather.  Ohnekase learned everything there was to know about making money, until he was put into the Troll Mages' program.

Vendor stuffs


There are 2 great things that you can get from vendors:  Profession mats, rare recipes, and pets.

Profession mats are great because people want them for their Alchemy, Enchanting, and other materials.  If you remember our second articles, where we bought enchanting materials, then sold them on the AH.  We can work on that.

Rare recipes look something like this from a vendor.

Ok, this is an example from another of my characters of a rare recipe found in Thunder Bluff.  notice the Merchant is only selling 1 of them.  This is something in limited quantity that people might want.

Finally, there are pets.  Companion pets are super cool little creatures that will follow you around and players.  Many vendors sell these pets.


Of course, here is the question that I know you would have on all of these.  "Wait a minute," you would say.  "If vendors have these items, why don't people go check them first."  The answer is very simple:  People do not know about them and/or people are lazy.

Lets take an example of the first one.  Pretend I am a level 85 character leveling up my Alchemy from 1 to 525 (very popular thing to do).  I am looking at making 100s of potions to get there, and I need a lot of Herbs (again, popular for people leveling alchemy not to have an herbalist or what not).  Because I need a bulk of materials, should I first spend 5 minutes going to the Herbalist or Alchemist to see if they have something I would want, or should I just go to the auction house and pay a small premium for them.  Auction house it is.

For pets, there are a sizable number of people who don't know about the pet sellers, or don't know about some of them.  They just click the Misc/Pets tab of the Auction House, click the Button that says, "Usable Item", and buy what they don't have.    Even if they are spending 10 times what they could vendor it for, either they don't know or they don't care (most players don't really cringe at spending 10+ gold at 85).

For these examples, us low level people can use this to actually make some coin.  There are so many ways to do it, with just a little bit of time and patience.

So, here is how it is going to work this week.  Ohnekase is going to get to level 5 and head straight up to Orgrimmar.  I might check some merchants on the way for stuff, but I am not going to train in any professions or anything, just going to head up there.  My hope is to walk in with 5 silver, then we will check places to try and make some money and put them up on the Auction House.  Every day, I will try and monitor my auctions to see if I can get some sales, and we will see how we are doing.

Lets give it a try

To level 5....and beyond....


Ok, first things first, leveling

I was sent to help what can I do.

Burn baby, burn

Vol'jin, it is a pleasure to meet you.  How can I help?

Holy crap, holding on for dear life.

Alright Vol'jin.  Lets take her down.

Nooo, my partner.  Nooooooo....

Ok, so we hit level 5, lets see where we are sitting...

Ok, so we are at 9 Silver and we have a bonus of 7 Clam Meat.  Clam Meat is used for cooking, and usually a pretty popular seller.  So we are going to try and sell those to for bonus gold.

Now, in Orgrimmar and see what we can find.

Orgrimmar...

First things first, I want to put up the Clam Meat and see if I can get just some small gold to work with for Vendors.

Nothing there, but I am gonna try for it.  They usually sell pretty well.  I am just going to go for 1 gold a piece, lets see what happens.  We may be in trouble. :P

Next, lets see what professions vendors have for us...

Some rare recipes, which is good.

More rare recipes

Ok, so here is the Strange Dust and the Essence.

So, I am going to try for a Strange Dust, first.  Lets check the Auctions.

Ooooh, this could be problematic

Wow, strike out for now.  Doesn't look like it is up for now.  However, we can hold onto it until later.  Lets check back later and see what else we can come up with.

Orgrimmar, part 2...

Ok, so lets check a day later at both the cost to sell the Strange Dust at, and if our Clam Meat sold.

Clam Meat Sold.  7 Gold will help us for our next step

Strange dust is up to 40 silver.  This is good news for us.  Now we can try and make some money. 

Ok, so, this is good news for us.  We now know that we can make money (also, note that the price of the Strange Dust is a little bit volatile.  We could technically use this too).  Now that we have 7+ gold to work with, lets start with buying some of the stuff we looked at.

Rare recipes from the Goblins.  Lets try that. 

Another rare recipe.  Lets try that as well.

You can get some tailoring patterns here and they are rare.  Lets grab them too. 

Ok, so we talked about rare recipes.  Lets try and sell them.  In addition, there is a Snake Vendor in Orgrimmar, lets grab 1 of each pet from him (50 silver each).

NOTE:  I grabbed the Steam Tonk Controller Recipe.  It was soulbound.  That was kinda dumb.  Oops.

In addition, I went and picked up the Strange Dust and the Magic Essence that we found from yesterday (it refreshed).  Now that I have a list of 10ish things to sell, lets see what they sell for.

Assuming they sell, 30 silver profit.  Not bad 

1 Gold, 25 profit 

Holy Cow!!!  I doubt it will sell, but if we can, that is 100 gold profit, for nothing.  Lets try.

Another Crazy profit.  Again lets try. 

1000%+ profit.  I will take it. 

100+ gold profit. 

If it sells, this is great for us. 

$$$ 

Even this one is pretty good.

Ok, so even if one a few of these sell, we have made back our money.  This is just wandering around for 5 minutes.

Again, lets give it a day and check it later to see how we do (we might not do well, but really, we are still not out too much and we haven't put in that much time).

Later...

Ok, we will check the AH one more time for 1 more 24 hour turnaround and see where we got to.

First, lets check what happened...

Ok, so the stuff that we put up didn't sell or got undercut.  So lets cancel them.  I don't want to give up on the Enchanting Mats, so I am gonna try again.  I am also gonna pick up some more Enchanting mats.  Finally, I wanna get some snakes and put them back up.

So, we picked up a couple more Strange Dust and Magic Essence and the Snakes.

So, lets wait one more day and see what we can find.

Last Day...

So, first, lets see what we sold

So the Essence, Dust, and a Snake sold.  Not bad.

As you can see below, the rest did not sell.

So, 2 of the Snakes didn't sell, which is fine, cause we have seen those pets sell without too much trouble.  None of the rare recipe's sold.

Lets look at what we have learned.

1. Items can sell even if they are not hard to get:  So, we went and purchased low level dust for 7 silver and sold it for 40 silver.  That is a pretty good profit for us considering the amount of time it took us (lets say 2 minutes for good measure).  Why?  Well, as I said, people are lazy.  If I am leveling Enchanting from 1 to 525 and I am at 85, I do not want to sit there and save 70 silver or so.  I am going to buy as much dust and essence as I can get.  Sure if the price is prohibitive (say 30 gold a piece for Strange Dust), then yeah, I will probably find other ways to do it.

2. Pets will sell:  As of this writing (looking at the website warcraftpets.com, I just googled it), there are 211 pets in the game.  I, like many others, love pets, and do like to try and get to the 150 pets for the littlest pet shop achievement.  That means that I am going to be needing a lot of pets for that.  That also means that I don't know or don't care where I get them if the price is right.  Do I care to fly to Thunder Bluff to go get the Prairie Dog (If I know it is there) when I can buy 1 for 3 gold on the Auction House?  For a lot of players, the answer is no.

A side note to this, it can also be advantageous if you try and get into the cross faction pet selling (it is difficult, but doable), you can actually make a sizable chunk of profit for little work.

3. Our Vendor Recipes didn't sell:  Ok, so this one is one I thought I would bring up because I want to defend my choice a little.  As it was here, and as I was trying to demonstrate, you can make money without leaving Orgrimmar or sitting on the Auction House for days and days at a time.  Vendor recipes are one way you can try to do that.  However, with Vendor recipes, they will not always sell.  For one, not everyone will need them.  If I am leveling Engineering, I may not care about the Red Firework Recipe.  Several people at max professions don't care about the lower level recipes (Note this, it is actually a good tactic).  The completionists do like to get all the recipes.  And they will usually pay to buy them, especially if they don't know or didn't check wowhead. 

Besides, we only spent 1 silver putting them up. So, lets say that we try and try and try, but cannot sell them, but eventually we will sell 1 of them for 20 gold in 2 months.  We are down maybe 2 or 3 gold for posting them up @ 48 hours, but still made 17-18 gold profit.  Is that bad?  Gold is gold.

4. If you put your mind to it, you can make gold anywhere:  If I play a character and am working on getting money, am I going to get to the gold cap with this method?  Probably not.  However, if I am a DPS waiting for a Dungeon Queue (which happens at every level of play), maybe stop in and grab a couple of dust and a few pets.  While you would be just running laps around Orgrimmar, Stormwind, or anywhere else, you could make a few gold.  Sure it isn't tons and tons, but it does make a difference.

Other Profession Recipes and Pets for profit.

So, we have found Mats and Pets in Orgrimmar and Stormwind.  However, I will tell you right now that there are a lot of Vendor and Pet Recipest to be found everywhere you go.  There are a lot of other blogs that have talked about this way of making money.  Rather than giving them all credit (and I think most blogs will mention at least one or two places to pick up a vendor recipe), I will go ahead and give you one of the better ones.

One of the blogs that I follow is http://nerffaids.blogspot.com/ .  I like her style and she has a lot to say on the subject.  I especially (for max level professions) like her WoW Gold Rush Youtube Videos.  They are great guides to use profession information and make money with very little time invested.  The real important reason I mention her on this post, though, is that she did a youtube video of a long series of places you can go to get rare recipes and pets to sell on the Auction House.  Now, obviously, if you just started on a server, you will not be able to get all of them.  But it is definitely helpful to know where they all are.  So here is a link to that Blog post.

http://nerffaids.blogspot.com/2011/10/vendor-recipes-and-pets-redux.html

Conclusion

Ok, so this blog post wasn't the most prolific, and I didn't end the thing with tons and tons of gold.  But if I made, say, 6 or 7 gold on top of what I had already been doing (professions or what not), then I wouldn't consider it a waste.  At low level, even having an extra 1 gold will help you a lot just in playing the game.

I know several people who had trouble affording their class training, their mounts, and all of the other important stuff.  So, being able to use simple tactics for a few extra gold will help.  In Faid's guide above, she is not kidding when she says you can make 1,000+ gold off of these recipes.  Sure, you wont make it in one sale, but one of the early lessons I learned is that it is easier to make 1,000 gold from 100 items than it is to make 1000 gold from 1 item.

So that is all I have to say for that.  I am sorry this was such a long post, but I really felt like this should have been something that was tended over more than one day.  It is important to get a little bit of cycling time and show that the percistance does pay off.

Next time, I am going to do a shorter post I think, where I discuss guilds.  In particular, I want to point out a couple of ways you can make money from guilds without putting them out anything (i.e. stealing or cheating your guildies).

So,

See ya next time....