How to trade use "Commodity Shortage Futures" as a crafter

As a crafter you may want to earn more gold from your crafts then the amount you would earn selling at the current lowest price of an auction. However posting at a higher price may force your auctions to expire before they sell if there is too much competition in a market keeping prices low.

Our "Commodity Shortage Futures" exists to help you learn what will go up in price so you can reliably post at higher prices to earn the most from your crafts!

Filtering to find items you can craft

You should begin by filtering the item category to items you can craft and editing the default average price and sales per day to match items you want to sell. For example if you are an enchanter who is specced into blue enchants you may want to view Item Enhancements with a low price and high sales:

Alternatively if you specced to epic weapon enchants you may want to change to lower sales and higher prices:

The search is highly customizable so I recommend trying different values and finding what works best for you!

Choosing a good market

This is the most difficult part of the tool as it relies mostly on game knowledge. You need to know your markets, know what people actually want to buy and know what sells reliably. The TSM Sales Per Hour value can assist with that and I recommend also searching on wowhead.com to gain further insight into what an item is used for if you are unfamiliar with it.

Using Oribos Exchange

The best tool for all of this is Oribos Exchange and this is why we include a link to each item in our search results. Their visualization of prices and quantity over time looking at past shortages will tell you everything you need to know about the real possibility of a shortage and price increase based on past performance.

It can show you how high prices can go, what quantity levels caused price increases in the past, how prone an item is to manipulation by posible player oligopolists and much more! Both Saddlebag Exchange and Oribos Exchange collect and use data the same way by recording the minimum prices and quantities each hour from the blizzard api. They present the data in a visually pleasing way and we use it to search for interesting opportunities.

Example of a good and bad shortage based on game knowledge

For two examples let's look at Enchant Weapon - Frozen Devotion --- Quality 3 and Enchant Boots - Rider's Reassurance --- Quality 3

(Note that Frozen Devotion requires skill point investment, while Rider's Reassurance requires reputation)

Lets first compare both oribos exchange charts:

You can see both are very low in quantity compared to the average quantity over time and are at quantity levels that had caused price increased in the past two weeks of data displayed. It is likely both would increase in price, but which item should you choose to craft if you have the ability to craft both?

Well any experienced enchanter will tell you that people pay for combat stats. Full stat enchants are often required for raiding. A raider on a budget will often choose to forgo the extra out of combat stats if it saves them some gold. Especially when the quality 2 version exists at a much lower price with close to the same amount out of combat stats:

By comparison Enchant Weapon - Frozen Devotion is the top selling epic enchant and for many classes/specs is BIS and required for raiding.

"Quantity Decline Rate" vs "TSM Sales Per Hour"

We can also see a reflection of this information in the Saddlebag Exchange. The TSM Sales Per Hour for Rider's Reassurance is 0 meaning on average there is less than 1 sale per hour vs the more respectable 9 sales per hour on Frozen Devotion.

  • TSM Sales Per Hour: This comes from the TSM regional sales api data and measures the average sales per hour based on data from TSM users. This is the best sale rate available, but it does often have flaws. It relies on TSM users over the past 2 weeks. If very few sellers in a small market are actively using TSM the sale rate may be far lower than reality. Take it with a grain of salt and use it more of a guideline than a rule.

  • Quantity Decline Rate: Alternatively we create this value by measuring the changes in quantity over the past 6 hours. While this is accurate, it is the result of many factors:

  • The number of items selling
  • The number of new items being crafted/gathered and posted
  • The number of items expiring
  • The time of day and day of the week
  • Players canceling auctions and deciding not to repost their items
  • Players canceling auctions and being prevented from reposting for any number of reasons (forgetting about items in your inventory, group finder queue's, real life interruptions, temporary or permanent bans, internet outages, server downtimes, etc)

So the TSM Sale Rate is often a bit inaccurate but provides a clear picture of direct sales. The Quantity Decline Rate is very accurate, but it might just be auctions expiring instead of auctions selling. A good measure of this is to see how wide the difference is.

For Mark of Sargha we can see the quantity decline rate is below the sale rate, meaning this is very naturally headed to a real shortage and more items are being added to the market each hour, but the cancellations, sales and expirations are exceeding the posting rate:

Alternatively when we look at the Forceful Nozdorite --- Quality 3 We see over 60% of the market swinging up and down, this is likely due to one player with over 1000 of these manipulating the price and letting their auctions expire.

A general rule is that if an items decline rate is 10 times the TSM sale rate its probably a shortage caused by market manipulation than a naturally occuring shortage.

How to pick prices

This is one of the most difficult issues to solve.

  • What is your item really worth?
  • How much should you craft?
  • How to price your stacks?

This all comes from prior experience and game knowledge, but I can make the following recommendations:

  • For crafters the idea is that you need a light touch. Less is more at a high price, as you get more profit with less items. Craft too many and not all of your items will sell.
  • Understand how much people are willing to pay and don't get too greedy. For a blue enchant it is not likely people will actually pay 10k or more for the item, but 500g to 2k is very reasonable and profitable when this usually costs around 100 to 150g to craft.
  • Don't post at a single price! Average out your profits by posting small stacks at many different prices. Small stacks at many different prices will sell far better than large stacks at a single price and will allow prices to go further up to capture even higher prices. The higher prices may not sell, but the lower ones will average out your profits to be much higher then they would otherwise be normally.
  • Fill market gaps! Lets look at this snapshot of Enchant Ring - Devotion of Haste and we can see gaps in prices between 151 to 189 and 189 to 250g and none above 250g! Posting small stacks at different prices between these will make your items more likely to sell.