Is it ok to sell your competition's wares on the Auction House.

In Today's Post I will be writing about something that has come up alot on podcasts, in guild chat, in the jmtc irc, which is the question is it ok to sell your competition's stuff on the AH. The answer is plainly yes but let me go into more detail with Pros and Cons and I'll list a couple of each with some explanation.

PROS

• you increase your stock while also simultaneously decreasing your competition's stock.
• you close the gap between the prices which in the long term will net you more overall gold
• you can have a positive effect on the price, by buying stock you lessen the amount of overall stock on the AH and the price only goes up with reduced supply.

Explanation of Pros: One of the major concerns to any auctioneer is do I stock than my competition. Now what the first pro is saying is you can buy your competition's stock at a price less than the current market value, if it's below that, and increase your overall stock and hopefully decrease your competitor's stock so that they'll have to go craft more. The remaining two pros are sort of lumped together, what they're saying is that if there's a significant price gap you can close that gap and make a profit. For instance let's say player A has copper ore listed at 10s each and player B as copper ore listed at 35s each, in this situation Player B, if they have the option to, should buy player A's auctions and relist them at their 35s each price. What this does is allow you to make more profit while your competition makes slim to no profit and loses stock, this also can and should have a positive effect on the price of the goods that they're buying. The only way it doesn't raise the price is if there's too many people undercutting people to hell.

CONS

• your competition could just be trying to dump stock while also lowering the price
• your competitors could be trying to wall others off from the market so that in order to sell something they'll have to post below the wall and then the waller just snatches them up and continues thus aquiring stock

Explanation: The first con is a situation many auctioneers find themselves in. Quite recently I found myself in a situation where i was sitting on dead money, which is stock that won't move fast, in the form of hypnotic dust I just couldn't sell it. Everytime i tried posting it in the form of scrolls or raw mats i was undercut instantly. So what i did was post my stock in stacks of 5 about 35s-75s I was still undercut which gave me a perfect way to snatch up some cheap mats for a rainy day, so I started to pick up stacks of dust for scrolls for later on. What this did was allow me to craft lower than my competitors hopefully could craft for. The only difficulty about this strategy is that you need alot of stock in order to maintain the wall to get enough stock to make it worth your while
So if you find yourself in a situation where you can easily buy your competitors wares think carefully and analyze your situation, try buying some of the underpriced stock and make a mental note of how many stacks of x amount were there and then come back in 5 minutes to see if the stock on the Auction House has rejuvenated or if it has stayed the same.