Guild Wars 2

When you put in a buy order, you can always take the order back down with no loss. However, for very expensive items like that, fewer buy orders are filled than sell orders. Additionally, if it’s an item that is no longer available, and thus has a very small supply, it is not rare for no buy orders to ever be filled.

So, for Black/White dyes, you can try for a buy order, and if it doesn’t work after a few days, take the order down and use the gold to just buy it instantly. But if you’re looking for something like an Enameled or Toxic dye, that no longer has an increasing supply, a buy order is not going to ever be filled.

I never pay “retail” for anything unless I really, really want it. That’s because I never sell to the highest bidder — I’m always a bit too greedy for that, so I tend to assume that even the low sell offers aren’t as low as someone is willing to go.

For my non-power-trading friends, I recommend a compromise: put in an offer in the middle. If you’re interested in a dye that is selling for 120g with buy offers at 100g (that 20g difference you mention), then lay down 110g. You should get your item reasonably quickly without having to spend time managing your TP offers. And you’ll still get a bargain deal.

(Just be careful to check gw2tp.com or gw2spidy.com or similar sites — sometimes there’s a spike and you don’t want to get caught in the middle of a speculation panic.)