Is /2 worth the effort?

Pretty much everyone that plays wow has had some sort of interaction with their trade chats, these interactions are sometimes very good, but most the time they are actually bad, but understanding how to use trade chat to your advantage is a utility that everyone needs to learn. Trade chat can be a huge marketing success and it can help you sell a lot of your goods in a much faster, timely manner, or it can be very annoying and using it wrong can sometimes give you a poor reputation on the server. That being said, I don’t actually use trade chat because I personally find that on my server it’s much more hassle than it’s actually worth.

What type of realm you’re on has a huge affect on how your trade chat works. On PVP servers, trade chat is generally 90% (depending on your population) people looking for RBG’s, arenas, and battleground partners, about 3% is trolling, 2% are guilds, and 5% of actual trading. If you’re on a PVE realm, you probably see about 60% spamming for arenas and battlegrounds, about 25% spamming for raids, generally 5% I would say goes to the trolls, 5% to the guild spammers, and again only about 5% for actual trading. Obviously this was not the intent for trade chat, thus while blizzard has given us a general chat, but as we all know most people just don’t bother taking note of the difference.Of course, these figures come specifically from my experiences, and there’s no real hard data to support any of my percentages. If you feel the trade chat on your server is actually used for trading, your chances of actually selling and buying items through trade chat obviously goes up quite a bit, so it may actually be useful for you to take notes on the etiquette and how to sell things in trade chat to up your profit margins.

It’s all about determining the balance.

• How Fast do i need the gold
• How much money can I make with either
• Is it worth my time to advertise
• Is it a hot item, or is it going to sit for days

The reason I say trade chat can actually be a very useful tool for you in your selling endeavors, is for the simple fact that you can display items to people that they may not have even known they wanted. (forgoing the auction house 5% standard cut is also a nice bonus) Part of understanding of how trade chat can actually be useful for you is understanding if you can take what you have to sell, forgo the 5% cut, and still manage to make more than you would on the auction house. A good use of trade chat is typically for selling high-end gear, large bulk items, and things that you may not be able to list in the auction house. (such as services)

Services

Services are an item that you typically cannot list in the auction house. Some examples of services include trade skills, raid lockouts, carries, and a whole host of other things. Obviously, the only real way to advertise your professions is in trade chat, and honestly trade chat is a very good place to find people who are looking for your trade skill. This is pretty much the only thing I actually still use trade chat for, however infrequent it may be. One of the ways to make gold in wow is selling raid lockouts and instance runs/raid runs, and for that specific purpose trade chat can be fantastic especially on the PVE realm. Carries, are something I don’t work with and for a few very specific reasons: you can’t always guarantee mount/item drops, generally the ability to carry requires a lot of focus and a very high skill set, and I don’t trust the people in trade chat to not screw it up. But if these are things that you typically sell, trade chat can in fact become your best friend.

High-end Gear

High-end gear is something the trade chat is generally pretty good with. High-end gear is something that you could easily sell in the auction house, but sometimes listing prices and the auction house 5% cut can can tinker with what may be tight profit margins. Advertising in trade chat however, is completely free. If you typically sell very high-end gear with large price tags, I highly suggest you spend the time and trade chat to see if you can move the item before listing. You really have nothing to lose in this instance.

Large bulk items

Bulk items are something that I have a lot of experience with, but also something that I detest trade chat for. When selling large quantities of items, you have a very precise idea of how much gold you need to make in order to make a suitable profit. Trade chat does not understand this. When you advertise in trade chat that you are selling bulk items, generally, the only people that you attract are people that are in fact in the exact same market as you and know how much they are willing to pay for it. If you don’t mind breaking your large whole lot into smaller pieces to sell to general players, the profits increase while the time to sell the items also increases. It all depends on your selling factors.

Tips and tricks for selling in trade chat

1. Always ignore the trolls, the more you feed them the worse they get.
2. Get your message across in the clearest and simplest way possible. No one wants to see “selling large amounts of X cloth! Get them while they’re hot, I’m not here all day! PST for prices and numbers!@@@!!!@!@@!@!” when they could easily see “WTS X cloth PST for info!”
3. Download an add-on to help, if you don’t know which ones to use, you can find Spammy in my add-on section
4. Don’t spam, no matter how fast your trade chat moves it is never a good idea to flood it with your offers. Persistence works much better than spam.
5. Don’t be afraid to haggle or even stick to your price. If you know you can sell in the auction house for more than they offer, and time is not a huge limiting factor, there’s no reason for you to drop your price dramatically. Also keep in mind when selling in bulk, dropping the price a little bit for large amounts can go a very long way.

Like I said, trade chat does not work for me but that’s not to say it won’t work for you. As usual, take what I say with a grain of salt, and don’t forget every server is different. Wow is a very subjective game, that’s why I give you the broad advice to make it work for you. In the comments below let me know how trade chat has worked for you and give me some examples, what sells, what doesn’t sell, how do you stop the trolls. And as always if you need to get a hold of me you can find me on Twitter.