Expanding the business - Enchanting

With 2 bankers going on autopilot posting glyphs, my main banker constantly buying cheap herbs which gets milled and stored, the time spent for Inscription upkeep drasticly went down - so it's time to explore a new market.

At the time, I had 2 professions up to speed - my mains Enchanting, and my abandoned warriors Alchemy. She was an Elixir Master from her TBC glorydays, but the elixir/flask market is a bitch with high deposit costs - so I decided upon Enchanting.

Since I'm all into the scribe-activities, it was easy to produce 200 Weapon Vellums and 200 Armor Vellums for starters.

My main has had Enchanting since early TBC, so I got alot of the good recipes, but none of the BOA-enchants, save for Crusader.
I had to start somewhere, so I used auctioneers data + a few manual searches to get a feel of the pricing on enchantingmats.
I decided to add to snatch:

• Abyss Crystal - 35g
• Greater Cosmic Essence - 20g
• Infinite Dust - 1g10s
• Dream Shard - 4g
• Arcane Dust - 2g50s
• Void Crystal - 2g
• Righteous orb - 35g
• Large Brilliant Shard - 2g
• Greater Eternal Essence - 10g

The TBC-mats is for Mongoose, which is still very popular. Arcane dust being the bottleneck here, with void crystals being dirt cheap, large prismatics made from splitting voids, and greater planars are accumulated in large quantities using the Halaa Trick. 40g for at best 12 planars, and at worst 6-7 planars + some arcane dust is a good deal either way.
Using this list + a couple of days + most importantly a weekend (lots of noobs dumping stuff below market price in weekends), I built up a really nice stockpile of shards and dust.
With those values set, I checked out the competition on my server - look at what they are selling, and what they are selling it for. Since some players get some enchantingmats "for free", you often see certain scrolls below material cost.
I used my own formula: Sum worst case reagent cost (those listed above) + price of vellum + 20g for a little leeway as my threshold, with a fallback price at 200-250%, depending on the enchant. I try to focus on enchants I know is high in demand, not using the glyph-philosophy here as the money bound up in the scrolls can quickly accumulate, lots of useless enchants = lots of useless bagspace wasted, and no deposit fees attracts campers.

• Blade Ward
• Black Magic
• Berserking
• 63 SP Weapon
• 81 SP Staff
• 10 stats chest
• Crusader
• Tuskarr's Vitality
• 28 SP gloves
• + some more I can't remember off the top of my head

I made a ton of all scrolls, made some nice QA3-groups which would ensure that I didn't sell for less than I wanted, and dedicated my Paladin to whore the AH with these scrolls.
I learned my first lesson in Enchanting very fast. Even though I got the most insane camper on my server I sold lots and lots of the most expensive enchants really quick - Berserking, 63 SP, 10 stats chest etc - and for a nice profit.
The problem arose with the draught of Abyss Crystals in my price range. I invested about 6k in abysses alone before starting this project, and they were quickly all gone. I kept it up for a day or two until AH really dried up of sub 35g Abyss crystals, so I was left with two choices:

1. Raise my threshold, and raise my prices to compensate.
2. Raise my prices alot, without raising the threshold.

I chose option 2 because me getting all those sales was due to going below the campers threshold, and the price I would end up with with option one would cause me to get camped - slowing down my sales, and binding waaaay too much of my total capital up in enchanting. Besides, there is so much money in the BOA-enchants anyway - but more on that later.
I wanted to expand further, so I aimed for a nice balance - and so far it's working great.
Next up: Expanding into Blacksmithing