Introduction To SimonBlackquill's Probably Useful Guide To Selling Food On The Auction House
When I came back from a long, 4-ish year hiatus, I looked up current food prices only to notice that there still didn't seem to be any guides up when I searched on Google, so...
This guide is for new-ish players (probably), hoping to streamline your Auction House selling and make it easier. So you’ve got yourself a coliseum team and you’ve made quite a bit of gold from hoardselling… but it isn’t enough to get that shiny new gene you’ve always wanted - or your wealth just isn’t growing fast enough. Are you intimidated by the Auction House? “How do you even determine prices, right? Every time I try to post something, it just expires! Hoardselling is just easier - the price is lower, but it’s instant and there will always be a buyer!”
…True, but posting food on the Auction House is one of the quicker ways to auction off hoard items behind Swipp and Baldwin materials, and you make over twice as much treasure as just selling from your hoard! It’s also very forgiving - even if you lowball it just to get out of your hoard quickly, you’ll always be making far more than its hoard sell value. All it takes is just a little more time, and maybe a bit of math (but the improved AH interface makes this easier, so no more spreadsheets and formulas!)
Enter: The point of this thread!
Every dragon needs food. They’re hungry fellas. And not everyone farms the coliseum for hours, but they also have growing and hungry lairs. They may want to use their gathering turns for something else, too. So why not make their food source… you? And you get to pocket some of their hard-earned treasure, of course. Soon, your Auction House Activity page will look like this:
The Problem:
You might expect a 2 food point item to sell for half the price of a 4 food point item. This is not so. Depending on the particular item, it may sell for less, but it also may sell for the same or more as the 4 points! This is why proper checking and pricing are important, or you may miss out on those sweet sweet margins by being reasonable.
Swipp, Baldwin, or Hibernal Den items may sell for much more, so it’s important to watch out for these and exclude them from these metrics. These kinds of items are marked in your lair by these icons:
Pricing Your Food
First, some scattered tips:
For non-Swipp food items, posting them in 1-stacks is a giant waste of your time. Don’t bother.
Post in stacks of 33, 66, or 99 - nice, neat little bundles that have consistent prices.
Sort unit price lowest -> highest is your friend and your most important tool.
Method 1
Item-By-Item
In this method, you will go through your hoard and check the prices of each food item that you’re selling individually. This is the way to make the most money as different items will differ vastly from each other, but if some items have messed up, jacked-up values it will take longer to sell or may not sell at all. Items that have little presence on the AH may also take a long time to sell. As well, it’s more work maintaining your selling list in the case that you’re undercut. I recommend this if you only have a small amount of food to work with, or you’re selling Swipp, Baldwin, Hibernal Den, or food that drops off of Coliseum bosses (10pts and above). (Or you just have the time to spare.)
In this method, have two separate windows open: one on the Auction House buy screen, and another on the sell screen. Search each item on the Buy window, and then click over to the Sell window to input your prices. When searching, you’ll have parameters that look like this. These are very useful for inputting exactly what you want!
Type in the name into the name box, then select the currency you want on the right (treasure, or gems). I prefer treasure, then buying gems from the forums for the best deals - but you can easily sell for gems to save the hassle, too.
On the bottom right, make sure that your sorting is going by Unit Price: Lowest to Highest rather than its default, Price: Lowest to Highest.
So, say you’re selling a little
. Good on spaghetti. To find out its unit price, simply search it up on the AH with the previously mentioned parameters, then hover your mouse over the item’s Selling price:
And it will give you the price for 1 unit of that item. 250 treasure per Cursed Garnish and there are 99 of them, so the whole shebang sells for 24,750 treasure. Not bad! If I hoardsold that, I’d have only made 4,257 treasure. Sad :(
Now go over to your sell screen, and post using the Price (Unit) column instead of the Price (Stack) column, using the number you just found out. Don’t bother posting your auctions for longer than a day, unless you don’t log on every day to replace it when it expires. It’s easy to re-post auctions, your food will sell quick enough to where it is unnecessary to post for longer, and food prices don’t tend to change that much anyway. (They do change, but even if you stubbornly repost for the same price, eventually it'll go.) Setting your auctions to longer than a day just increases the amount of treasure that is taken by the house when the item is sold.
Method 2
Unit Price By Food Point Level
To make things a little easier, we can skip the step of checking each item and just check what the food points are going for instead. If you search up an item and there are no other entries to base the price on, this is a good way to find an alternative. Additionally, if a price seems absurdly high or absurdly low (such as if there’s only one of a particular food item on the AH for 100k treasure; chances are you’re never going to find a buyer) you can use this parameter to double-check.
Of course, this can also save you a bit of time. If you have 20+ different stacks of food to sell and don’t want to search everything up one at a time, then just enter the category of food (for example, meat), the number of food points it has (for example, 5), type of currency you want, and finally, search and sort by unit price. You can now find the price which 5-point meat items generally go for.
This is still a very good way to go about it. Where it sometimes fails is that you may be underpricing for certain items that may still command a higher price for whatever reason; but this typically doesn’t happen unless the item is a collectible, (similar to the aspect statue items) a crafting material of some sort, or from a coliseum venue that is not farmed very often. While these items may sell for higher, they will probably take longer. This method is very quick.
Method 3
Price Per Food Point
This method requires a little math to calculate, but it can be worth it. In this method, you are charging a small amount of treasure, then multiplying that amount by the number of food points the item has. The result is your per-unit price of the food. An advantage of this method is that its standard across all items, and once you figure out a good number for each food type all you have to do is quickly plug the numbers into your calculator/spreadsheet and go (or, if you only sell in certain stacks, keep a list). A disadvantage is that the resulting price may differ from the item’s actual market price - it may be much higher, or much lower, depending, and unless you’re checking often it will eventually become out-of-date and begin to affect profits/selling speed.
To calculate the price-per-food point, set up your search parameters like this.
Let the total sale price of 99 4 FP Insect food be P. A stack of this food has 396 food points (99 * 4). (P / 396) = price per point. Collect a few samples from a few entries on the AH, then repeat for 3 FP items, 5 FP items, etc. Average out the resulting numbers you get, and that’s your price per food point!
…Of course, you don’t need to do so much work; but I like spreadsheets. If you are lazy, then just take a value from whatever the 4-point food is for each food type. Keep in mind though that the fewer samples you take, the less accurate your price will be. If you want to standardize your prices to accommodate all kinds of food, take lots of samples. (The calculations can be easily automated using a spreadsheet.)
Interestingly, doing this showcases the weird thing about food: 4-point food is actually the cheapest! Even 2- and 3-point food is more valuable than poor ol’ reliable - this is because the 4-point food has the best food:cost ratio, and thus there is more competition for selling it which eventually drives prices down as more people post their auctions. Plus, it’s dropped out of many of the venues which are used for leveling fodder or grinding for treasure, so there’s a greater supply of it. 4-point food will sell extremely quickly, but you’ll get slightly less treasure for it. Other kinds will take longer but net a slightly higher treasure gain. It’s up to you what you choose - but, chances are you’re actually farming for other items such as apparel, gene scrolls, etc, or leveling fodder for exalting, and not going to a venue specifically for food… so this doesn’t particularly matter.
Here are some values to start with:
Meat: 65t PFP
Insect: 65t PFP
Seafood: 50t PFP
Plant: 40t PFP
*These values exclude 2-point items, as these tend to be skewed very high in price, as well as any item that is 6 food points or above. 6p+ items are only found by gathering, crafting, or boss drops; and because they are more difficult to obtain in higher quantities than food that can be farmed in the coliseum, they should be checked individually on the AH and excluded from a per-food-point metric. 2-point items should also be priced in this manner, as gathering high quantities of them takes longer (drop rates in the coliseum are pathetic in lower-level venues).
Also, keep in mind that these were calculated with a not-particularly-high sample size and that these numbers are not hard and fast. Experiment with these - raise them until you begin to have trouble selling, lower them once your items stop selling. (Usually seafood is the most expensive one, very odd.)
Feeding Your Dragons
If I’m selling all my food, how will my children eat?!
You’ll have plenty leftover! If you find yourself visiting one venue over the others, then only sell your food in increments of 33: 33, 66, 99. If you have 72, post 66 and convert the remaining 6 into food points. If you have 23, then either keep those until you farm more or convert if you need the food. If you visit many venues and have a whole bunch of kinds of food in low quantities, then I prefer to post in increments of 10 and convert the leftover. A stack of 22, post 20, convert the remaining 2, etc. You can use your gathering turns to supplement your food supply with higher-quality food (lvl 30+) than what you can find in the common grinding venues if needed. (you have been leveling your food gathering, right?)
In Conclusion
For the best balance between ease -> profit, I recommend method 2. You’ll ensure your stock is moving quickly while still making 5x+ the hoardsell value of your items - and it doesn’t require that much attention or time from you otherwise. Now that the AH interface is much better at searching, I believe that pricing per food point is wholly unnecessary - it’s easier to just look up 4-point items when you’re trying to sell a 4-point item! Maybe it still has its place, though.
