How To: Professional Glyph Selling

Posted by Daeity On Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Just wanted to make this quick post because I noticed a lot of readers were interested in how to sell Glyphs. You don't even need Auctioneer to do this either, although it does help in tracking quantities and it's Quick Buyout feature.

It's definitely the most lucrative gold making method right now (selling Glyphs) and will pick up again when Cataclysm is released. Although Glyphs are now permanently learned, there will ALWAYS be a need for them and will always sell well.

Based on statistics I gathered from over two most recent (pre-4.0.1) months of selling Glyphs (50,000+ transactions), all Glyph sales were based on UNIQUE users. Meaning that Glyphs were purchased for permanent reasons, and there were a negligible quantity of players that actually bought REPLACEMENT glyphs. And this was YEARS after Glyphs were first introduced. Bottom line: they will always sell, and this new change to Glyphs won't effect sales that much.

Here are the basic tools you need:

Auction Profit Master - Used to be called Quick Auctions 3, this is your bread and butter.
Postal - for quickly collecting Mail Items.

Additional Tools (optional):

Auctioneer - From just a Glyph selling perspective, this is extremely useful for it's EasyBuyout feature (it's DISABLED by default FYI!) Make sure you download the latest Beta btw to ensure it's always up-to-date.
Altoholic - for tracking mats and item quantities that you have on all of your characters.
Panda - For Mass Milling of your herbs.

Note: As of 4.0.1 automatic posting and cancelling does not work anymore, so you have to click on a button for each transaction. It's just a minor annoyance, and probably upset most of the Glyph sellers that were AFK posting/selling. Didn't bother me at all though, and I was hoping that Blizzard would actually do something more significant.

Getting Started

First thing you need to do is learn how to use Auction Profit Master. Here's an old video on YouTube for using Quick Auctions 3 and it best explains. There are very little changes between QA3 and the new APM version.

(FYI: Quick Auctions 3 was abandoned by the developer, and he gave the source code to a new developer to continue the work on, hence the tool was renamed to "Auction Profit Master".)

All of the other tools are just automated and require no setup (except for Auctioneer - TURN ON EASY BUYOUT and set limits!). Other than that, APM is the only tool that requires configuration to start selling Glyphs.

Follow the instructions in the video to get started. Type "/apm config" instead of "/qa config" to configure the Addon.

After watching that video at least 3 times, here are some key items (and strategies) you should be aware of:

1. Item Group -> Add Items. Remember, you can only Add Items if they are currently in your inventory. So make sure you find out which Glyphs are selling the best, craft them, and THEN add them to your Glyphs Item Group. (Keep reading to find out which Glyphs sell the highest.)

2. Override Undercut: This is how much you undercut other sellers by. You can make this 1 copper to really piss them off, but I usually undercut by 50 silver or 1-2G. If there are very few sellers and little competition, undercut them by 1s.

However if you have a lot of time and gold on your hands and there is a lot of competition, drive down the prices significantly (10G each undercut for example). It will hurt both of you (you'll be selling Glyphs to break even), but will come out on top if you have a steady supply of mats and inks. Basically, you want to drain them of all of their resources so that they can't create any new glyphs.

3. Override Threshold: This is the MINIMUM amount you want to sell Glyphs for. This should be _slightly_ above the cost of crafting the Glyph. This amount is HEAVILY influenced by herb prices too so pay attention.

- Milling stacks of Adder's Tongue, Icethorn, Lichbloom gives 6 total [Ink of the Sea].

- Milling stacks of Deadnettle, Tiger Lily, Goldclover, Talandra's Rose, Fire Leaf, Fire Seed gives 4 total [Ink of the Sea]. (It's actually closer to 5 on average, but I'm using 4 for safety).

Glyphs require 3 of each Ink + Resilient Parchment (40s if Exalted).

If the average price of a stack of Adder's Tongue sells for 40G for example, you MUST sell your Glyphs at a minimum cost of 21G or higher.

If the average price of a stack of Adder's Tongue is 30G however, you can sell your Glyphs for 15.5G (to break even) or higher.

Use a calculator when deciding minimum thresholds for your Glyphs. APM won't post Glyphs if their too cheap, it will only post the ones that make profit for you.

You'll want to sell all of your Glyphs for 30G or higher, and keep buying out all herbs/mats off the AH using EasyBuyout. If you have any competition that falls below the crafting price, BUY THEM and put them back up for auction (classic Buy Low/Sell High strategy.)

4. Fallbacks -> Override fallback: This is the price you want to sell Glyphs for if there are none on the AH or the only competition is very expensive. I usually put in 120G or 150G per Glyph. This is all server dependent though, but don't get too greedy or they won't sell.

5. New Auction Tab Features

If you open up the AH, and click on the "Auctions" tab you'll see a bunch of new entries at the top. Familiarize yourself with these.

Status: It will let you know if anyone is undercutting you, but Cancel already does it anyways so this is pretty useless.

Cancel: Will scan all of your posted Glyphs and cancel the ones that were undercut so that you can repost them.

Post: Posts all of your Glyphs and will automatically undercut each of your competitors.

Summary: Very important. This will show you the prices for all Glyphs, and is very useful when first setting up APM. Click Glyphs, then Get Data. You can click on each of the Glyphs to Queue them for crafting later. Left-click to increase the quantity, right-click to reduce.

Log: This LOG button can be toggled on-and-off while scanning is taking place. It's a history log of all transactions.

6. Your New Inscription Menu

Finally, if you open up your Inscription crafting menu you'll see a new button in the top-right corner called APM. Click on the button and it will open up the Crafting Queue mentioned above.

Here you'll see all of the Glyphs that you queued for crafting and each quantity selected. Scroll down below and you'll see all of the materials required to craft the glyphs. Collect the mats, and start clicking on each entry and they will be automatically crafted for you.

Once all of your Glyphs are ready, and they have all been added to your Item Group, just click POST and all Glyphs will be automatically posted and undercut for you. The only new feature is that you need to confirm each post, so get ready for a lot of clicking. =]

One you're all good and setup, it's just a matter of constantly clicking CANCEL, retrieve your mail items, and POST again. Once every hour, every 30 minutes or every 10 minutes depending on competition.

Glyph selling is a VERY time consuming process and you'll have little time for anything else. You'll always be watching to see if players are undercutting you for example. However, it has a high rate of return.