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Wednesday 7 December 2011

The Pricing Trap strategy – what is it and what is its purpose?

Continuing the series on Advanced Strategies today I am looking at The Pricing Trap Strategy.  Tomorrow i will discuss how i combat this strategy.

The prior posts on Advanced Strategies were Hello there stranger! - what is it and what is its purpose? and Hello there stranger! - how to combat this

But, moving to: The Pricing Trap strategy – what is it and what is its purpose?

This is where a competitor posts 1 of each item at an ultra low price which is just above crafting cost.

The primary purpose of this strategy is to hoodwink other market participants into posting items at a lower price and so below cost price and therefore to allow the competitor adopting this strategy to pick up some items at a cheap price whilst forcing those that fell for this strategy to make a loss.

It is not a strategy that is used to force other market participants out of the market or indeed to improve one’s own market position.  It is an opportunistic strategy that is adopted on occasion to take advantage of market participants that are blindly using addons without any built in safety features to their posting prices.

Spotting this strategy is primarily done by pay attention to the posting prices of your items or what the lowest posting price would be.  There are two ways to do this with TradeSkillMaster.

The first way is to have the “Browse” tab open whilst TradeSkillMaster is going through your items to post.  It will flick through each page quite fast but you can easily get a feel as to how the lowest price compares to the normal price for each item.  Indeed, in Auctioneer you will see blue percentage numbers that are very low indicating that the lowest posted price is way below the normal average price.

The second way is to have the “show auctions” button open when you are posting your items with TradeSkillMaster.  Assuming you do not have a macro that connects your mouse wheel to the posting button then you will be able to see how the lowest priced item compares to the other prices on the Auction House.


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4 comments:

  1. stupid is what stupid does

    ReplyDelete
  2. what is a good built in safety add on to avoid this?

    ReplyDelete
  3. "what is a good built in safety add on to avoid this?"

    Use your eyes and brain ;)
    and don't click buttons like a robot.
    my be 3min posting instead of 1min, but you will have the chance to see your other competitors names, quantity of items listed, spot cheaters, and recognize other players tricks.

    Buy doing that you can Learn and Evolve your trading skills, not your button clicking skills :)
    the

    ReplyDelete
  4. There is a safety feature on TradeSkillMaster you can activate to prevent this - which will be in the next post in a few hours time. But, it is to put minimum posting prices in the tool.

    ReplyDelete

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