Buying low, selling high, making money by playing both the gold AH and the money AH in D3

On any markets there will be movement up and down. These cycles vary in length: during the day, week, month and year. Knowing this already puts you ahead of the curve, but how do you act on it? Well, basically you buy low and sell high. The problem is, how low is low and how high is high? In D3 there are transaction costs and to quickly reiterate: Items will cost you a dollar to list (on a successful auction) and then you pay 15% to transfer to Paypal or nothing to transfer to your e-balance. Your e-balance is for buying Blizzard items and for buying on the real money AH. Commodities will cost you 15% to Blizzard (if your auction is successful) and then you pay another 15% to transfer to Paypal or nothing to transfer to e-balance.

Make money working the AH

Now we can start the mathing! If you sell gold for 100$ you will pay 15% to Blizzard, taking you from 100$ to 85$, and then 15% to Paypal, taking you from 85$ to 72.25$. So if you sell gold for 100$ you end up paying 27.75$ in transaction fees. This also means we are paying 27.75% in transaction costs. In order to make money on the gold we just sold, we need to have bought it for less than 72.25$ to have made any gold on it. If you bought it for 70$, sold it for 100$ and paid 27.75$ to transfer it out, you would have made 2.25$ in profit. That’s stupidly low for the risk you are taking! Bear in mind that all the way up to where you sell at around 100$, you are in the red and stand to lose money instead of making money! To put it another way: if you intend to flip gold, the selling price has to be 38.4% more than your buying price. If you buy at 72.25$, you need to sell at 100$, which is 38.4% more. If you buy at 100$, you need to sell at 138.4$ and so on. There will be cycles in the markets, and this is also the case in Diablo 3, but the only time you will see this much difference, is when someone fucks up and sells too low. This also means that the amounts of gold we are talking, won’t be very large.

How about buying directly from the grey/black market?

Hitting the grey/black scene and purchasing directly from the gold farmers could be an option. If they sell straight to you, they pay way less transaction fees and can then sell their gold cheaper. But they won’t be selling at less than 72.25% of the gold price on the official real money AH. If they did this, they might as well sell on the AH and get a larger market. If you are offered a price under 72.25%, you need to be really, really careful. Especially if it is from someone you don’t normally use and the price is extremely low. If the goldfarmers suddenly start dropping prices massively, they have found a dupe and are flooding the markets with duped gold. Blizzard will be all over this, since their way of monetizing the game is through the real money AH. If people suddenly start selling nothing for something, then the bottom drops out of the market and inflation runs rampant.

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