My Surprise Cataclysm Niche Market - Chocolate Cookies

© Nev 2008 - Chocolate Cookies

If you've not come across this before, Cold posts a Carnival topic & lots of different people do posts & send him the links for one big article link post each month - Colds Gold Factory Carnival has all the details & previous months topics. This months' topic is a little difficult for me as I'm not really a niche market finder or player, I just poodle along doing bits & pieces here, there & everywhere!

What Was A Niche Market That You Were Surprised To Find Or That Did Better Than Expected In During Cataclysm?

So how did I decide what to write about? I went back & re-read every post I'd written since Cataclysm launched in December 2010 & the only 'niche' item that jumped out at me was...Chocolate Cookies of course! What else would the so-called Chocolate Cookie Queen talk about? Coincidentally, I have Cold to thank for that title I think. He called me that after one of my early appearances on Power Word:Gold Podcast Episode #9 :)

Now I wrote about this way back at the beginning of May 2011, just as patch 4.1 introduced several new food & drink achievements. My post 'Cooking For Gold, Patch 4.1 Style' explains most of my method & it was later linked to on WoWInsiders blog too. That was an exciting few days for me - my blog traffic went crazy as you can imagine but I also had my best ever Chocolate Cookie sales week!

As with many niches, it was soon full of competition so I left that market. Now that I'm back playing, I should revisit it & see if there's any life left there!

Now in terms of how much gold was made, I lost all my sales data in July 2011 so I only have the screenshots from my blog posts to go by but between 3rd May and 4th July 2011 I made almost 10,000 gold just by selling Chocolate Cookies. If you consider that the cost of materials was cooking tokens & simple flour from a vendor, that 10,000 gold was almost pure profit. I'm sure that figure would be higher if I had my full sales data. I only used to post the top part of my MySales data so there are some weeks where Chocolate Cookies wouldn't have shown up.

Yes there are niche markets out there that made more gold & I'm not suggesting that anyone would get rich from this one but as an easy sideline, perhaps for lowbie alts in town, doing cooking dailies for XP & a little cash makes for a nice little boost to anyones cash balance.

Cooking for Gold, Patch 4.1 Style

With the introduction of several new food & drink related achievements in patch 4.1, I have seen a rise in the prices of almost all the cataclysm buff foods & drinks craftable by my maxed cook. Most notably, chocolate cookies have been flying off the shelves especially when I add a little bark linking the cookie to the new 'You'll feeel Right as Rain' achievement.

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you'll know that my DK sat in SW at lvl 75 for ages. I had no need to level her to 85 for either JC or Inscription recipes but I did do the fishing & cooking dailies on her for the guild rep. However, her cooking skill is maybe 150 so she couldn't really make use of the Chef's Awards until patch 4.1 hit! Yay for Bario Matalli & his bag of Imported Supplies which costs just 1 Chef's Award token & contains 2 stacks of Cocoa Beans (although I have had bags with 51 cocoa beans so there's obviously a proc type thing in there too).

Off I went to buy my cocoa beans, 20 bags later I had 46 stacks of the darned things! Sent them all to my cook , ran to the cooking supplies guy in SW Old Town & started a massive cookie baking marathon. Luckily I have the Chef's Hat (from the Dalaran cooking dailies - I was 80 for a long time before Cata hit!) which vastly increases cooking speed so it wasn't too long.

I posted 200 of them on the AH in stacks of 20 at 75g a stack although the achievement only really needs 91 - I just wanted to keep to nice round numbers but actually, I realised afterwards, I was making people buy 9 extras! Then I barked in trade 'get your 'You'll Feel Right As Rain' achieve, Chocolate Cookies in AH now!' and sat back to wait a few minutes before barking again. I didn't have to wait that long, I'd say within 2 minutes they had all gone so I listed some more (but at 80g this time) & repeated. Same thing happened. In less than 20 minutes, I'd made & sold 400 cookies for over 1500g & I still had enough left for hubby & I to get the achieve too!

 

Fast forward a couple of days & I realised that I'd lost my top spot in the guild for achievements so I had a quick look to see which achieves I could knock out quickly. Apart from the three /love critters, the next quickest would be the Cataclysmically Delicious & Drown Your Sorrows ones so off I went to the AH to see if any of the foods were available cheaply (especially the ones I can't cook yet or didn't have mats for).

The prices were ridiculous! Some of the vendor bought items were listed for 30-50g each although some were still under 5g each. I smelt an opportunity so as of today, I have had a cook up of all the cataclysm foods I can & have them listed at reasonable (around 10g per) prices for singles. When I logged off last night, they were selling fairly well but with the login servers down this morning, I've been unable to find out just how well :)

So if you have a high level cooking skill & spare chef's awards, what's stopping you? I think this will be one of those markets I jump in & out of 'ninja style'. I'll be keeping an eye on the cookies in particular but where I've been selling the odd ones & twos of cooking mats, I'll cook them up now & sell the food instead. The bonus to that is the Guild achievement Set the Oven to 'Cataclysmic' which, in a small guild like ours, is a long way off for now.