Making Gold by Splitting Stacks

Today we are going to look at ways to make money by splitting stacks of items that you buy in the Auction House. There are many reasons why people don't want to buy full stacks of items. Sometimes they only need one or two of an item to make (or have made) something they want for their character. For example, take the Mooncloth robe, I just made for my Mage. I needed two golden pearls and I didn't have any, so I trotted off to the AH to pick them up. Much to my dismay, there was only a stack of 20 for 25 gold. Now it's not like I could not afford to buy the stack, but I didn't need 20, I only needed 2 ! And as any of you that have been playing WoW a long time know, the market for gold pearls is not what it used to be before they upped the drop rate. I remember shelling out (pun intended :p) 40 gold for two pearls to make a robe for my priest, back in the day.

Most any other time when this happens, I just buy the stack, take what I need and then put the rest back in the AH for the same price I paid for it. (A nice way to get your mats you need for free) but since selling gold pearls is pretty hard to do, I didn't want to be stuck with 18 of them. I ended up bumming them off a guildie, who was just as happy to get rid of them and make space in her bank. It was a good solution, but make sure you don't make a habit of hitting up your guildies for stuff, unless you are just as free in giving them stuff in return.

Other reasons why people don't want to buy a full stack may be that they don't have the money to buy the whole thing, or they are just too cheap to part with it. There are any number of reasons why full stacks don't always sell, but the why isn't that important. All you need to know is that you can benefit from the fact that they don't. If you buy full stacks, there is a good chance that you will be able to split them up and sell them for more than what you paid. For example, I picked up a stack of Super Healing Potions, in the AH today for 11g 25s. I immediately turned around and split them into 3 singles for 3.25 gold each and one stack of two for 6.5 gold. A neat 5 gold profit (less AH fees, of course) with no muss and no fuss.

Now I know you are asking: How do I know which items to try this with ? I am sorry I cannot give you a list, there are simply too many. I know which ones to pick because I have leveled most all professions, so I know what stuff is needed for them. I also am familiar with what mats make the more popular potions that are always needed (like health, mana, agility, defense) and what items are needed for quests (like ungoro soil and Hillman's cloaks) and stuff like that. However, there are some standbys that I think are almost always worth a look:

Leather - especially heavy, rugged and knothide
Cloth - especially wool, mageweave and runecloth (always wanted as it used for rep turn ins)
Shards - small and large brilliant and radiant shards, and large prismatic shards
Herbs - almost any herb will work
Metals - not the low level stuff, but thorium bars are needed for arcanite transmute, fel iron bars are needed for a quest and Eternium Ore is needed for enchanting, to name a few.
Potions - most any type of potion that sells (some don't) you can split up and resell.
Primals - everything in BC needs primals. 'Nuff said.
Gems - I usually stick to lower level ones.
Elementals & Essences - air, water, earth, fire, undeath......these are all used in professions and sell well in ones and twos.

I could go on and on, but one thing you need to remember is that each server is different. How popular some things are on a server that has tons of 70's may be very different than a newer server with very few high levels. Another important thing to remember is to make sure you look to see what the going price is for singles of what you plan to split. If you buy a stack of pots that you need to sell for 3 gold each to make profit, make sure that someone doesn't have 10 singles in there for 2 gold each.

Well, that's all for today, hope you all make some gold !

Jade