Trading pets between realms - Am I doing it wrong?

[Morazor]

Let's start saying that I'm really not into economy in general, so my logic may be wrong.

While testing Pet Magpie multi-realm trade feature (I will release it shortly, I promise ) I tried to trade some pets on another realm and I failed hard. In general, pet market now is quite bad because there are very few new players and old players already have what they need. But anyway...

My server is a low population server, which means that auction prices swing very hard. Sometimes stuff sits at very high prices for days, then suddenly everyone goes farming that thing and flood the market making prices fall to the ground.
I have an alt on another low population server. Basically I wanted to try to make some money hoping that having a swinging price here and a swinging price there could be good for the profit. I tried selling some pets there but I couldn't sell anything even with very deep undercuts, probably because being very low in population there's no one interested in buying.

Now I'm planning to try on a high population server, hoping to find buyers and decent prices on rare pets.

Do you have any advice that can help me? How faulty my logic on this topic is?

[Drudatz]

Id wait till Pre-Patch/August cause there will be more players and maybe even some new ones

[Morazor]

Also the Warcraft movie may bring a lot of new players around.

[Paladance]

Look at my pets named "Tre", aswell as other 24s that might have been reintroduced.
I have also additional Winter Veil and Love Fool pets, Cinder Pups etc. in my banking guild bank.
I'm such a lazy girl! and I appreciate your incoming help.

If world was a pure math, I'd sell seasonal pets halfway to the next event that was a source. For example, currently Coin of Many Faces sells for pretty 5-6k on my undercut realm.

[Morazor]

If world was a pure math, I'd sell seasonal pets halfway to the next event that was a source. For example, currently Coin of Many Faces sells for pretty 5-6k on my undercut realm.

I think math can explain a lot of things, often the problem it that we can't see the full picture

I'm keeping some pets for the future too, like Cinder Pups and Left Sharks. Now they are basically worthless, maybe in the future their price will rise. The main problem is that basically everyone that played in 6.2 already have them and there are so many sitting around that they may be starting to gain some value in... I don't know, 3-4 years? Will WoW be still alive? Will I be still alive?

Long term reasoning isn't really my cup of tea

[Avalee]

Living fluids were only about 6k last expansion. Now they sell for over 30k. So it's to be expected that the same goes for the sharks.

[Digem]

Living fluids were only about 6k last expansion. Now they sell for over 30k. So it's to be expected that the same goes for the sharks.

Living fluids never dropped as much as the Sharks do. The pets from the tanaan dailies or from erris have a good chance to raise in price but the skarks will take years to rise in price unless somehow thier move base becomes needed

[Sarajiel]

A quick look at the Undermine Journal listed auctions for roughly 10k Sharks and 6.5k Pups in both EU & US regions combined. Anecdotal I've seen folks on Argent Dawn EU having a hard time giving them away for free. It's probably safe to assume that it is a really bad investment to stockpile them.

A much better bet are all those rare drops that will become even rarer when the population moves away from the WoD zones. [pet]Ore Eater[/pet]s or [pet]Nightshade Sproutling[/pet]s with the popular breed(s) might be the pets to get now.

@OP
From my own experience of cross realm pet trading during the last 2-3 months it seems to work best grabbing cheap pets on a low pop server and re-selling them on a high pop one. I mainly play on Aman'Thul (EU) and Argent Dawn (EU) and 90% of my pet sales are on AD. The trick is finding popular pets that are somewhat limited on the supply side, but easy enough to get in general. Before using Pet Magpie I focused on DMF pets and [pet]Elekk Plushie[/pet]s. For the last couple of days I tried some more pets and noticed that I can even make a decent ROI with pets like the [pet]Terrible Turnip[/pet].
However cross realm pet trading requires a bit of gold to get started and a decent amount of patience. Some pets took weeks to sell, but making 1000% profit on some of them is definitely worth it. If you are looking for quick profits tailoring is probably much easier.

[Paladance]

Living fluids never dropped as much as the Sharks do. The pets from the tanaan dailies or from erris have a good chance to raise in price but the skarks will take years to rise in price unless somehow thier move base becomes needed

Yeah, I've been thinking about a hypothetical pet hub recent month ^^ and among various unusual tasks, I'm going to include a weekly quest for donating a full-grown pet (so no spamming lvl1 tabby cats and dragonhawks)… But what would be a good reward for that, besides reputation? Or only a huge rep boost?

Aw, that's just some silly vain brainstorming. Ignore that.

[Morazor]

However cross realm pet trading requires a bit of gold to get started and a decent amount of patience.

Lately I'm trying to move money to Silvermoon because usually pets are at a lower price there. For some reason, I've sold quite well Veilwatcher Hatchlings at 1200-1300 gold. I'm buying those at 850 gold with rep discount, so it's a decent way to move money (also with a marginal profit).
I've found that the cool thing of trading on two realms is exploiting differences. For example: on my low population realm BMAH usually has very low competition, I've managed to buy a couple of Argent Tournament pets at 2000-3000 gold... they sell for much more on Silvermoon.

If you are looking for quick profits tailoring is probably much easier.

Pet market seems very slow at the moment, probably I would make more money by doing heroic dungeon call to arms with my tank
I'm mostly doing it to buy pets at a decent price anyway, on low pop server sometimes prices just skyrocket so high...

[Paladance]

Sometimes still prices just can't be real.
A [pet]Ravasaur Hatchling[/pet] (found in open world, lying on the ground) for 10-19k?
Even considering the inflation, someone was dreaming a bit too much.

[Flow]

Trading pets across realms may seem like a lucrative business, but it's a lot of work. Lots of players are doing it for the token so the difference in price is less now. The biggest problem is that if the pet doesn't sell within a couple of days you will be undercut (some probably moving pets, seeing the same price difference you did). You will either have to lower your price or move the pet to another realm (hence the work). You can still earn a decent profit but you'll have to find your market. However, you can maybe get a better gold/hour ratio clearing cata 25m raids or farming old stuff like Blood of the Mountain or doing professions. Would suggest you keep track of time spent and profit on trades.

This time in the expansion is actually a great time to sell pets, players are finishing up things such as the pet collection. It's not going to be any better when Legion is ready for release.

[Morazor]

Sometimes still prices just can't be real.
A [pet]Ravasaur Hatchling[/pet] (found in open world, lying on the ground) for 10-19k?
Even considering the inflation, someone was dreaming a bit too much.

On low population realms happens often... it doesn't make sense anyway, at least for pets. For exampe: if I'm the only one selling food on AH and it's raiding night, I can basically force people to pay a very high price for my food or go raiding without it. If you are just collecting, pets are not something that you need, you can always wait for better prices. Unless you are trying to sell something widely used and known as a good pet, putting a very high price makes no sense IMO. But posting a pet auction costs only 1 silver for 48 hrs, it's like buying a lottery ticket or something like that

With the token price that is the same price for all the region, having separate auction houses makes no sense. IMO they should rework the AH to be one for all the region and give it a decent UI and functionality (I'm thinking of Guild Wars 2 or Steam AH).

[Waflob]

The thing to bear in mind with any high-price auction is that just because someone wants to sell something for 10k gold doesn't mean that anyone is buying for that amount.

Some people try to skew data like this, by repeatedly posting a cheap item for 20k gold and then posting it for 10k, in the hope of some poor newb thinking he's getting a bargain.

[Flow]

The thing to bear in mind with any high-price auction is that just because someone wants to sell something for 10k gold doesn't mean that anyone is buying for that amount..

So true. Because of fewer pets for sale prices will reset a more often, and then you see just one or a few items very overpriced for a little while. But in my experience it's hard to sell pets unless the price is at least somwhat close to the region average.

[Myica]

@OP
From my own experience of cross realm pet trading during the last 2-3 months it seems to work best grabbing cheap pets on a low pop server and re-selling them on a high pop one. I mainly play on Aman'Thul (EU) and Argent Dawn (EU) and 90% of my pet sales are on AD. The trick is finding popular pets that are somewhat limited on the supply side, but easy enough to get in general.

A lot of the good arbitrage opportunities are long gone. I miss the days of buying Vengful Porcupettes on Illidan for 3k, selling em on Stormrage for 16k-18k, buying commodity pets (Idol, PWS, etc) to move the money back to Illidan, repeat; I bought so many TCG pets/mounts with that strategy. It still can be profitable to move pets around, but I spend far less time and effort on it than I used to.

These days if I want to build up gold on a server with a large pet market I find pets like Panderan Water Spirts, Death Adder Hatchlings, and Black Tabby Cats sell 'quickly' and for either a smallish profit or loss when transferring from smaller markets. If I just want gold for tokens I buy one of the TCG pets on a server with a big market, move it to a smaller server and sell for a largish premium. The round trip can take a few weeks so it's not exactly fast gold, but the gold per time /played is still okay.

[Melanis]

I tend to just post at the price I want for weeks at a time until someone buys. I don't turn less then 10k profits on pets, sometimes it takes me a month or two to sell it. I try to keep a varied stock so I don't end up with 87 hatesparks lol. 2-3 of any one pet at most for me.

[Paladance]

Two days ago I've noticed an unbidden [pet]Hippogryph Hatchling[/pet] on BMAH. I managed to keep a wonderful bid 33k for almost a whole day only to be obviously outbidden.
To 150k+.
While on a regular AH it was for 149k.

I'm very naive, ain't I?