Profession Kits -- A Nuts and Bolts Introduction

What is a Profession Kit?

Boiled down, a Profession Kit is just a big pile of materials.  In one place and for one price you can buy all the mats required to level up a profession from zero to max skill. A customer will buy the materials, haul them over to a profession trainer (some kits require several trips!), and craft the items necessary to skill up. 

What's the market?

It's all in one word: convenience.  It's for people who have gold and who want to switch to a new profession in the shortest amount of time, or are just tricking-out a new level-85 alt.  Most people do not want to farm dozens of stacks of Embersilk Cloth or Borean Leather.  Nor do they want to spend hours (or days) in the Auction House waiting for those items that only seem to show up once a week with 5 other players competing for them.  Customers like that are willing to pay a premium to someone who will just hand them the mats pre-packaged and ready to roll.

Additionally, I'm betting that once Mists of Pandaria is released there will be a mass of new Pandas who didn't waste time with a profession in the rush to get to level-90.  Those toons will be breaking down my doors to get to max skill quickly.  (That's when the prices will go up.  <grin> )

What's the profit potential?

The profit in a kit depends on several factors. 

1. How much of the material are you willing to farm, and how valuable is your time?  If the kit is a profession which you already have at max skill, then your only cost would be time. 
2. How much time can you invest in checking the Auction House for items you can't farm (or don't have time)? For me personally, I have 24/7 access to the Auction House, e-mail notices set up at The Undermine Journal, and shopping lists for each type of kit set up in TradeSkillMaster to monitor for steals and deals.
3. What is the convenience worth to the buyers?  This is not something you can predict, and will vary among different customers.

How do you set prices?

You could, theoretically, keep accounting for all the mats you buy and set prices like that, but a savvy buyer will compare your prices to what's available on the AH now.   I set my prices the same way -- how much will it cost me today to replace the mats in the kit I'm selling.  In other words, I'm actually selling the next kit I buy.  

If that sounds confusing, here's a little-known fact about gasoline prices: the filling station does not set their gas price based on what they paid the refinery for the last delivery -- they set it based on how much they think the next delivery will cost.  They need to make enough selling what they have now to pay for the gas they'll have next week.  That's why gas prices rise immediately when there is a war or crisis -- they are anticipating paying more for the gas when the next truck arrives.

There is a relatively new website, www.warcraftprofessional.com (still in Beta, but a nice tool), that will give a very close real-time figure for what it would cost to powerlevel a specific profession on a specific server and faction.  I say "very close" because the list of materials used at Warcraft Professional differs slightly from the list of materials at www.wow-professions.com that I use as my kit checklist.  That being said, the lists are very similar in most respects, and the price given is a good metric for powerleveling.

*I* refer my customers to Warcraft Professional (WP) and then set my prices just a little over the price shown there -- because the mats that I don't farm myself I buy on the AH, but only when they're well below the average market prices.  So even at the WP price, I usually have at least 30% profit built-in.  At worst, if the WP price is temporarily low I may break-even on the kit that I'm selling today, but I'll probably be replacing those mats at the same low prices and the one I sell next week will be even more profitable than usual.

What do you need to start?

At minimum, you will need a toon with his/her own guild bank, seed money (to buy what you can't farm), a good set of addons, and patience. 

Ideally, the guild bank should be dedicated to selling the kits with no members but yourself, and will have to have enough tabs for at least one complete kit (from 1 tab for Jewelcrafting, to 4 tabs for Tailoring), plus a tab or two to store the deals you come across for the future kits. 

The amount of seed money will depend on your farming time and ability, but even the simplest kits usually take a few items from professions other than the kit's purpose (e.g. the Blacksmithing Kit requires some Netherweave Cloth). 

My essential addons for kit building and selling:

• TradeSkillMaster -- I know it's a beast to learn, but at minimum you want to use the "Shopping Options" to set up the lists of materials you will need for your kits, even stuff you plan to farm for yourself.  Sometimes stuff will show up selling much cheaper than normal, and you may find it convenient to buy rather than farm at those prices, saving time for farming the more expensive items.
• Altoholic and/or Goblinventory -- If you have several toons that can farm, buy, or store items, you will want to have a way of checking where all your mats are located without having to log between each toon every time.  These addons (and many others like them) save untold frustration by allowing you to see what you have on all your alts all the time.
• Auctioneer or Auctionator -- This one's not strictly neceassary, but I like Auctioneer for ease of purchasing -- TSM requires a couple of extra clicks to complete a buyout, where Auctioneer is one-click buying.

And finally, remember that your own patience is required in the same measure as someone actually doing the leveling.  The basic profit in offering a kit (just as in any real-life job) is that you are trading your time and effort for someone else's money.  It will take time to get everything together and make it ready for a buyer, especially arranging everything on guild bank tabs. More about that later.

Next Time...

Setting up materials lists, guild control, and how to handle the sale.

Ladies and Gentlegoblins:

Welcome to The Occasional Goldbug, my soapbox for the gold-challenged.  As the name implies, this will be probably be an infrequently-updated, mostly stream-of consciousness blog.  I am hopeful that the reader will find an odd bit of useful information amidst my verbosity and fluff.  There are many sites offering information, but few of my musings are available on other blogs.  Where I find something useful elsewhere I will link rather than parrot or plagiarize anything that I find helpful elsewhere. 

About Me

I have a wife (just had our 28th anniversary!), four kids (all of which have played WoW at one time or another), a programming job, a church volunteer position, and six cats who think they're ninjas.  As a result, I am a simple, non-hardcore WoW Player who finds the game-within-a-game of making gold to be an entertaining pastime when real life will not allow me long blocks of time to raid.  I am more interested sometimes in coming up with obvious groan-inducing toon names than actually doing something profitable -- among my alts: Volksworgen (for Cata) and Pandamoneyum (held until MoP releases).  However, for the time being my real-life profession allows me to check the Auction House frequently (All hail Remote Desktop and the Mobile Armory!) and scour for deals.

My first dabbling in Gold-making came when the Darkmoon trinket cards suddenly became BoE, and few people noticed -- many were the catcalls I endured when offering the DM trinkets in Trade -- "You can't sell BoP!" --  allowing me to build up (and sell) a considerable stockpile of these trinkets just by looking for bargains on the individual deck cards via the Auction House, getting up to around 50k gold before competition set in.  Even afterward, those trinkets continued to be a source of income until the end of the LK xpac.  Without any assisting add-ons.


Now I use Auctioneer, TSM, and Altoholic in my toolbox, plus a few specially developed private spreadsheets (more for listing and arranging mats in guild bank tabs than for calculating).  I do some transmog flipping, but have not found it nearly as profitable as I had hoped -- probably because I came late to the transmog game, not really checking it out until several months after it became available.  Most of my gold has come from finding epic items (not transmog) early in a release or a patch that are listed for way below their market value, and flipping them for large profits, though it's an inconsistent income.


I have yet to venture outside the comfortable refuge of Vek'nilash, a medium-population realm that always places in the Top 5 Least-Important Servers Ever.  My biggest bank alt is a dwarf named Spitzenspark, a name lifted from an old programmer humor page:

• Sign on a German mainframe computer: Das Machine is nicht fur gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken mit spitzensparken...

 My main is Thenamir, a human Holy/Ret Paladin of moderate healing skill and questionable DPS, but you can't be denyin' he's stylin' and profilin':


Thenamir in his Pimpin' Style

My Niche

My special niche has become assembling and selling what I call "Profession Kits" -- A complete package of materials needed to level a profession from 1 to 525, usually in a couple of hours.  (I would credit the idea to its source if I could just *remember* the source, but whoever you are, thanks for a great idea!)  The originality I bring to this party is mostly in streamlining and perfecting the concept of profession kits, and tips and tricks for making them as easy and profitable as possible. 

My first few blog entries will be dedicated to detailing how to assemble, store, and sell these kits, but the main idea is that people will pay a premium for the convenience of getting eveything at one time, in one location, and without having to travel, farm, or wait for items to appear on the Auction House.

Everything I Know I Learned From...

I have to give special credit to The Consortium and The Undermine Journal, for providing so much good data and timely commentary. 

Next Time...

Profession Kits -- A Nuts-and-Bolts Introduction