Big Gold Profits from Glyphs
This video walks you through my process for making extreme amounts of gold from buying and selling Glyphs at the auction house.
Now, if you’ve been following my techniques for a while, you know that I don’t really advise anyone to follow a crafting profession in order to make a lot of Gold. You can do it to be helpful within your guild, or because you enjoy giving the stuff you make to friends and so on. But when it comes to making gold the fastest way possible, crafting is just way too time consuming for it to payoff.
Things have actually gotten a bit better in the Wrath of the Lich King setting, specifically for Inscription, but also to some degree for Jewelcrafting and Enchanting. This is basically because these professions create items that are in constant and repeated demand – players who want glyphs, and gems and enchants tend to buy them over and over again – and because there is now such a huge number of desirable items in each of those categories that you can often sell your stuff for high prices, with little competition.
But what I’m showing you today doesn’t actually require the Inscription profession… not at all.
Walkthrough: Buy/Sell Glyphs
It’s really easy to buy big stocks of good glyphs that will sell well. You can buy them at prices below the cost of making them, literally below cost. And then of course, you will sell them on the auction house at the price the market is actually willing to pay.
Just to give you an idea of the scale of this, you can often buy ordinary glyphs – the “Major” glyphs that every Scribe learns automatically from trainers – for less than 1g each. And if you’re patient, you’ll be able to get most of the rarer “Minor” glyphs for well under 5g each, sometimes as low as 1g.
Then on the selling side… well, my rule of thumb is I don’t sell any Glyph of any kind for less than about 10g. With the Minor glyphs, my basic minimum price is 20g. And for the glyphs that are in high demand, whether they are Major or Minor glyphs, I’m aiming more at the 35g – 50g range.
Click the link above to watch exactly how I do this (runs 36’05”).
Hey Jon,
On my server I have been working the Glyphs much like you are, but most of the prices are half of what you are selling them for. Do you think it will improve or have I missed the bull market?
Where can I find that other blueprint movie you was talking about?
First of all I would like to say GREAT Video! It was very helpful. I had a question for you though.
You said at the beginning of one of the two videos that you shouldn’t craft your own Glyph’s. My server seems to be selling much higher then yours, and I am having a hard time finding the discounts that I was seeing you get on your server. So do you think that it would be worth looking into Inscription as a Proffession and making my own Glyph’s? Or do you think it would still be to time consuming/costly?
Hey Graham, thanks for the comment 🙂
My general advice is that crafting isn’t the best way to make a lot of gold fast, whether it’s Blacksmithing, Tailoring, Alchemy or whatever. However, I’m starting to re-think that, since Inscription is coming on so strong. Mostly because there are so many items in the profession, so cheap to make, and demand is strong enough to give a huge profit margin.
So yes, I think it is worth getting into Inscription. You can still make more gold faster by working the auction house etc. following my Massive Gold Blueprint. But Inscription (and maybe Enchanting now too, or even Jewelcrafting) is also a solid way to go.
Hi Jon,
Thank you for all the valuable information you provide. I love your hints and they are often very helpful to me.
I do want to make a comment (NOT a criticism of you) about your recent Twitter entry.
In your Twitter you wrote…
“Just bought 20x Glyph of Unstable Affliction for 3s each, it’s a Northrend researched glyph, selling 25g and up – bargain of the day?”
Is it just me, or do others also feel that the seller made a BIG mistake when listing these items and did not realise their mistake. Personally, I would feel bad about keeping (and relisting) these Glyphs. A similar thing happened to me about 6 months ago when someone listed a stack of Adamantite Ore for about 30s instead of 30g. Obviously a mistake. I very quickly bought the stack and posted it back to the seller. He was very appreciative and we added each other to our friends lists, ran a few instances together and generally had a bit of fun. I think that sometimes doing the right thing is worth more than an easy gold score.
I have 150k gold on my character after having bought 50-60k of stuff over the past 3-4 months, so I am not a soft touch about making gold. I too will certainly snap up bargains, but there are occasions when a little understanding and generosity count for more than in-game gold.
I hope I do not offend you with these comments.
Hey Steve – no offense taken 🙂
I don’t think there’s any way this posting of glyphs could have been a mistake. It was 20 singles (not a stack) of a glyph, all priced at 3 silver. Even if the seller meant to price at 3 gold, it was bad auction house conduct. It’s a bad mistake to put up more than 1 or 2 of any glyph at once. It’s a bad mistake to pay no attention to other prices on the auction house for the same item (there were other lots of this glyph up for sale at 25g – 30g at the time). And it is very easy to cancel an auction if you make a mistake while posting.
In my opinion, this was just bad play. Unfortunately, I see similar things all the time. And in fact, this particular seller has been putting up hundreds of glyphs at stupid low prices for several days – this was just the most glaring example.
I no longer have any patience or sympathy with players who are so incompetent in the auction house that their actions damage the economy and ruin the game for other players. In the past I have tried helping people like that, by giving them pricing tips, suggesting strategies for the auction house etc. This *always* gets me nothing but grief – they always think they know what they are doing etc etc, tell me I’m an idiot, and it just wastes my time.
Consider this case in detail. There are 20 or so players on this server actively pursuing Inscription as their gold-making profession. It costs them 6g – 8g to make the glyph in question (cost of herbs for milling etc.). If there are players putting them up for sale at 3s, what should they do? Just let the market tank, and give up Inscription?
I make several hundred gold daily selling glyphs. I use everything I know to maintain a healthy and profitable selling environment for glyphs. I work hard at pricing my stuff at the right level, and I try to play fair with the other active glyph sellers. If I stopped actively cultivating this market, and just started sticking stuff up with mindless undercutting (which is what 90% of auction house sellers will do), the market would have died long ago, and no one would be able to do Inscription as a profit-making profession.
My opinion of sellers who behave like the 3-silver glyph seller is that they are damaging the game for others. My response to them these days is to take advantage of their stupidity. And in cases where they are actively “griefing” the auction house (deliberately aiming to undermine the trade of active auction house players like me… this happens), I attack them and try to drive them off (by aggressively undercutting everything they put up for sale, until they go away).
For those who want to follow my Twitter feed, btw…
http://twitter.com/secretwarcraft
– Jon
Thanks for your response Jon. I understand your point of view and agree with it entirely. I think my example was different to your experience.
I also LOATH the FOOLS who have destroyed mining and skinning economy on my server. It is not no longer worth my effort to list Borean Leather and I just vendor any I happen to have. Ores are now ridiculously low in price and most days I don’t bother flying around mining any more. I listed a few DE mats the other day and noticed a couple of dys later that they expired. I had a look at the AH and those mats had been undercut by 4-5 g a stack, and mainly by 2 fools.
There are times when I think… “OK, 150k gold is enough. Lets do something else in game. It is no longer worth suffering the fools in the AH”
Okay Jon, it seems that you are genuinely concerned with the economics of the AH. I myself am fairly new to WOW, I started playing approx 1 month ago. With that in mind I have now leveled my inscription up to 350 and will be actively pursuing it more, can you give me some tips as to not upset the inscription and herbalism market and yet make money….sigh…forgive my ignorance
Joe,
I just wanted to comment on the “glitch” with auctioneer not seeing some of the items that can be seen on the normal browse tab. It may be worth looking at your outlier settings (if I remember correctly) I don’t have the game in front of me at the moment. I noticed that an auction where this glitch happened was a 9 Gold glyph that the other toon was selling for 20 G this is well over a 100% difference and possibly the reason for the glitch.
Nice videos I have been making well over 3000 gold a day for a few months selling to both factions, and like the general content of your videos, they are a very good place for a player unsure of the Auction House to get started.
Grats and keep up the good work
Edit, to last post sorry for the typo
Jon,