Sunday, January 24, 2010

Vendor Pets

After seeing early on what vendor pets are capable of selling for, I created an exclusive toon to sell vendor pets from. This took quite a while to set up, but once finished, provides you with a steady income. Or, if you're a goblin it can be a nice supplementary profit to your other markets. I don't bother much with crafted pets from Engineering since the whole concept of this AH alt was to profit purely from vendor-available pets.

Why would someone buy a pet available from a vendor at much cheaper prices? A toon is lazy and knows they're available or they're ignorant of it's location. Either way, you profit.

Basics
There are eight Horde pets, ten Alliance pets, one limited supply Alliance pet, two at Booty Bay, five in Netherstorm and three Dalaran pets available from vendors. It's important to note that all of the faction pets are accessible by a lvl1 toon. It's just the Netherstorm, Dalaran and Booty Bay pets that require a little travel.



Cheap Pets
Black Kingsnake (Org)
Brown Snake (Org)
Crimson Snake (Org)
Red Dragonhawk (Fairbreeze Village)
Golden Dragonhawk (Fairbreeze Village)
Silver Dragonhawk (Fairbreeze Village)
Prairie Dog Whistle (TB)
Cockroach (UC)
White Moth Egg (Exxodar)
Blue Moth Egg (Exxodar)
Yellow Moth Egg (Exxodar)
Rabbit Crate (Ironforge)
Cat Carrier Bombay (Goldshire)
Cat Carrier Orange (Goldshire)
Cat Carrier Cornish Rex (Goldshire)
Cat Carrier Silver Tabby (Goldshire)
Cat Carrier Siamese (Netherstorm)
Hawk Owl (Darnassus)
Great Horned Owl (Darnassus)
Parrot Cage Senegal (Booty Bay, limited -- Netherstorm unlimited)
Parrot Cage Cockatiel (Booty Bay, limited)

Expensive Pets
Albino Snake (Dalaran)
Calico Cat (Dalaran)
Obsidian Hatchling (Dalaran)
Red Moth Egg (Netherstorm)
Brown Rabbit Crate (Netherstorm)
Blue Dragonhawk (Netherstorm)
Mana Wyrmling (Netherstorm)
White Kitten (Stormwind, limited)

Personally, I stock 50+ of each 'cheap' pet in the mailbox of my alt. Having 12 pets in a single mail, with 50 mail items visible at a time, allows for a huge storage space and easy restocking between cancel/post sessions. Just make sure to return and mail back a batch before they expire every 30 days.

The cheap Horde pets are all put into a Quick Auctions group with a set fallback and threshold. I use 15g fallback and a 1g threshold with two of each posted at a time for 24-hour posts. This allows for huge percentage profit without flooding the availability.

The Alliance pets I set into a second group that has higher margins since they're harder to acquire by my fellow Horde. Fallback prices are set at 75g and thresholds still quite low at 5g.

The expensive pets fall into a third group with a much higher threshold so I don't lose any gold on a transaction, but the Fallback is significantly higher at 300g since they aren't seen often on the AH. Many first-timers will be more inclined to make the purchase if the price is high versus more affordable. If it costs hundreds of gold, it must be a rare drop right? :)

There is no Refund button on the Auction House and you should always take advantage of that lacking feature.

Results
I've made over 7k gold from vendor pets since starting my gold-making run to a million. It's not a huge slice of my pie, but it's steady and a very fun category to profit from. I've only recently brought over Alliance pets in bulk and as you can see...



it's made quite the difference in sales. I've cleared more than 2k gold in the last week alone on pets.

My next step to advance this category is bringing my first bulk batch of Horde pets to my Alliance alt. Not only will I be doubling my presence on Auction Houses, but the Allies are the large majority on my server.

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