Knowing When to Say When.....AH Bullying (special guest: Beastie Boys)

Now there has been quite some talk about beating the competition with buying out their auctions, and listing for higher. "Owning the market". "Bullying the competitors". No matter what you call it, you can win.....or lose. I guess it comes down to who is the better bettor...I say I had good odds today. Read on, young whippersnappers....

A while back I posted about purchasing items from vendors and reselling them. There are alot of different ways to do this, and in that post, I spoke about the Inscription Vendor you can find in any major city. Now the Dust of Disappearance you can normally make a few gold on (depending on competition pricing), but this post isn't directed at that. It is about the Vanishing Powder, which you can pick up 5 for 36s. Pretty cheap, huh? Yeah. Today, upon logging in, I ran up to get my normal stack of DoD to "flip", and decided to pick up a few stacks of the Vanishing Powder.

I go to the AH, and see no one is selling. So I toss them up for a very "reasonable" flip. I do an AH scan, and I check back about 20 minutes later, and see they all sold. Hmm. Ok. Normally doesn't happen THAT quick. So I hit the vendor again, grab up a few more stacks, and as I get ready to list them......

I notice that someone else just hopped into the game, and put a ton of them up. C'mon man....supply and demand? Not sure what their thinking was, but hey, by all means. So I toss up a few more, undercutting by "almost" half, and.....You know whats coming next, right?

Yup. Sold em all out. And who was the buyer? You guessed it. So what's an Alto to do? Try it again....I buy two stacks, put them on the AH, and what do I get?

But it couldn't be...not again....This time I will give you two guesses, and I imagine you will get it on the first try....(change of subject quick...does anyone listen to Directv music channels? It's really funny, but Sabotage from Beastie Boys is playing right now. Kinda fits...Hahahaha.) Alright, back to my post...Where was I? Oh yeah, Guess who????

Wow. You are right! Again! How did you guess? It was once again the "bully" pushing me out of "his" market. Alright. I can understand doing this type of business with, uhm, let's just pick a random crafted market, Netherweave Bags, because in all reality, there is NOT an unlimited supply like in this situation. And for a whole 7ish silver apiece, this cat just bought 60 of these from me, so basically handed me over 270ish gold.

Now don't get me wrong, this style of AH'ing can work to your advantage, but I don't recommend doing it in this form. I mean, a month'ish ago when I posted my original article on selling these, I noted that they really only sell on weekends, I can normally sell them for around 2-3 gold each, pulling in 40ish gold profit per 20 stack. But within an hour, I sold 60 to one guy. All due to his "bully" tactic.

To all reading this, you have probably done this or been a "victim" of AH bullying yourself. At some point. It happens quite a bit with the Mysterious Fortune Cards, but once again, they are "limited" crafts. Normally, your competition will only have limited amounts, so you can use and abuse as much as you desire (or feel you are able to "risk"). Did I mention crafted goods sell quite often? These powders do not have the demand to play this game. He is going to have to sell a few weekends worth of these to just "hit" what he lost to me in an hour by trying to "bully" me out.

Now I could be completely wrong in this whole post, and wasted both mine and your time, maybe he had a hidden agenda that I wasn't aware of or haven't seen....but I doubt this.

I want to end this post by saying thanks to my unscrupulous bully, and let them know that at any time, they can feel free to "donate" to the Alto Fund. Thank you sir. Or madam.