Catching Up On Great Comments

Thanks for the well-wishes as I still wage my war against this crummy flu. In between sniffles I've been able to catch up on some great comments that have been left over the weekend. Especially the my post on why expired auctions are OK and how they shouldn't get you down.

I appreciate and will respond to all comments. It's also a good source of new topics. So feel free to jump into the conversation or plant a seed for a topic you'd like to see.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back to feeling sorry for myself and being excessively whiney to Mrs. Og.

*Cough*....Sniffle...Blah

/grab Kleenex
/whine

The Not-So-Mighty Og has been leveled by a nasty bug these past few days. I'm a little backed up on responding to your comments from the weekend, but I will.

Ugh.

Expired Auctions Are OK

Inspired by some of the comments I received from yesterday's post on my failures in the WoW Auction House (AH), this post shines some additional perspective on my wins and losses in the AH.

Yesterday I mentioned my overall rate of failed vs. successful auctions. Those are average numbers. Averages smooths out all the rough spots. That means that on some days I feel like I'm King of the World. On others I feel like I'm King of the Chumps.

Looking back at the last 17 days, here's how my successes compared to my failures:



It's pretty obvious which days were the really, really good days and which had me guessing if I had any cheese left at all. This is normal. The AH is volatile.

But it's predictable over time...and that's the real secret.

Bottom line - you are going to have Good Days, Bad Days and days that make the bad days look like Freakin Awesome Days. But as long as you are sticking to the fundamentals, you'll keep growing your pile of gold through them all (even when it doesn't feel like it).

I'm A Failure...

...approximately 32.64659271% of the time.

It's a rough guess.

That percentage represents how many of my auctions failed when I was doing my latest Rags to Riches experiment. For whatever reason those items just didn't sell how I thought they would.

Taking a look at how I'm doing post-experiment I'm sitting pretty at about a 44.25% failure rate.

A 44.25% failure rate?!?!

You got it.

Does that bum me out? Nah. Do I go in the corner and crawl into a fetal position? Nope. In fact I'm pretty darn happy about it.

Why? Because you cannot succeed at flipping in the World of Warcraft Auction House (AH) without failure. Small failures. Spectacular failures. Noobish, /facepalm, I'll-never-speak-a-word-about-this-to-anyone failures.

It's how you learn. A failure is only a failure if you don't learn something from it. When an auction fails, ask these questions:

1. Was my price too high?
   
2. Was it a low volume day on the server?
   
3. How was my price set in comparison to the competition?
   
4. Was there A LOT of competition (saturated market)?
   
5. Did I post too many of the same item at once (saturated market)?
   
6. Is this item really as valuable as Auctioneer says it is?
   
7. Is there a very low demand for this item?
   

You should have a good sense of what the answers are to all these questions by the time you're done scrutinizing the expired item. Having these answers will position you better the next time you target/flip these items.

Now you may be thinking, "Whoa Og, let's back up a second. Your failure rate has jumped nearly 12% after the series. That's huge! What in the Hellfire Peninsula is up with that?!?!"

It means I'm taking more risks and pushing the Lucky Red Envelope of this getting-less-new-by-the-day AH. I'm buying more goods, seeing what the saturation point is and getting a feel for demand.

And I'm sprinkling in a few bonehead purchases that prove I still whip out the [Flashlight of the Noob] to sniff out bargains from time to time. Which means I'm not taking my advice, chasing profits that aren't there and not walking away as soon as I should.

It's OK to fail. Your successes will far exceed the failures and fund your "education." I'll leave you with a bit of baseball trivia...

When Babe Ruth was the home run king, he was also the strikeout leader.

/cast [Create Food For Thought]
/chew