World of Warcraft – The Auction House – Familiarization Tips for More Gold (Part 1)

Part one of a guide that will help you familiarize yourself with the Auction House in World of Warcraft.

The Auction House

The Auction House is the lifeblood of any gold making strategies in World of Warcraft. It is extremely important that everyone who reads this guide understands how to use Auctionator, Postal, Market Watcher and the Trade Channel. Further, auction trading is a discipline and an art. I can’t teach it to you with one paragraph, there’s no 1-trick that will give you the edge over other people. Instead, it’s a game of patience and knowledge. Understanding how to properly use the Auction House is very important so I have included an entire chapter focused on it. There are even guides out there like Reaching Gold Cap, that focus entirely on the Auction House. In this chapter you will learn about the essential addons to use to make buying and selling on the Auction House much easier. You will also learn about buying items and reselling them for a high profit. I will also discuss ways in which you can find your own niche to make tons of gold. Finally, in this chapter you will learn about techniques including market manipulation of the prices of items and about bidding on items and getting them extremely cheap. It is these kinds of strategies that are discussed in this chapter that will make using and selling items on the Auction House much easier. You will be able to quickly assess the value of items and make informed decisions regarding pricing. What you won’t learn in this article is how to best sell items that YOU crafted in your professions. I will dedicate an article solely for this. So keep checking back.

Common Mistakes & Misconceptions

It’s best to start by clearing your mind of a few common mistakes and misconceptions about making gold on the Auction House. These are the problems I encounter most often with people who are struggling in this area. Here’s a list of common mistakes that you need to avoid if you’re going to learn to make gold on the Auction House the way I do.

Know the Numbers – Auction House Cuts

Every time you sell an item on the Auction House you will only receive 95% of the sell price, Blizzard takes the rest in what we call the “auction house’s cut.” For instance, if you sell an item for 100g you will only get 95g in the mail. This is important because it marks the minimum profit you need to make in order for a trade to be successful when selling on the Auction House. It also tells us that if a player is selling an item in trade chat it should sell for at least 5% less than the going rate on the auction house. Some players will forget this fact and expect full price in trade chat or worse yet calculate their profit based on receiving 100% of the sell value. Don’t make this mistake, always keep in mind that your faction’s Auction House will take 5%. The neutral Auction House in Booty Bay and Gadgetzan will take 15% when you sell cross faction. This is a huge amount, making it very difficult to be profitable

on the neutral Auction House or perform cross-faction arbitrage. Deposits are another thing to consider. The deposit is the amount you have to pay to post the item up for sale. You will receive this back if the item sells but you will not get it back if you either cancel the auction or the auction expires. For 12 hour auctions it’s 15% of the vendor sell price, 24 hour auctions it’s 30% of the vendor sell price and for 48 hour auctions it’s 60%. This makes it important to price expensive items properly or avoid posting entirely. Fortunately, not a lot of items have a high vendor sell price.

Being Impatient

Some people might think that the purpose of this chapter is to teach them how they can log on and in 20 minutes make a few thousand gold off the Auction House. Don’t get me wrong, you will ‘earn’ thousands of gold in short periods of time but you will likely hold onto those items for several days or even weeks before you cash in on the items you purchased. Trading on the Auction House is a game of patience and wisdom. You won’t be able to login on day 1 and earn this type of gold either. You will need to watch the Auction House prices for several days if not weeks before you have the confidence to start capitalizing on the price fluctuations.

Thinking I Can Share Numbers With You That Will Make You Rich

Some people are looking for specific numbers, like ‘buy all the X you see that go for less than 500g and repost them at 700g’. This guide is not here to give you price specifics like that. I might share with you the price ranges I use but these are dependent on the realm, faction and time that I used those prices. The most important factor in making gold trading on the Auction House is knowing the value of items. If you traded for 2 weeks and watched Abyss Crystals sell for 30g almost every Tuesday evening and now see a stack of 17 Abyss Crystals at 20g each, you need to pull from your experience to quickly make that investment before someone else does and know how long to wait before reposting them. Knowing these price ranges for as many high volume/cost items as possible is going to help you make gold on the Auction House. Unfortunately I can’t teach you the numbers I use, unless you play Alliance on my realm, and even then my criteria for buying/selling changes regularly.

Thinking You Always Need to Undercut

A lot of people complain about having to undercut all the time and losing money. This is a bad habit many people make when starting off on the Auction House, especially people who farm something and try to sell it as quick as possible. If you farm 5 stacks of Saronite Ore and just undercut the lowest stacks on the Auction House you’re probably not going to make as much gold as you wanted to. More than likely, someone like me will see your lowball post, buy it immediately and post it 2 days later for a 3-digit profit.

Prices stay low for periods of time, sometimes days or even weeks. You need to be patient and watch the prices come up before you post your items. If the prices are low, and you know it, you can buy a lot of inventory to sell during high price periods. This is how I make a ton of my gold. There are situations where you will want to undercut as quickly as possible, these apply to special circumstances like selling crafted items and vendor pets.

You can use Market Watcher history (which we’ll discuss below) and The Undermine Journal to see what prices ought to be for a specific item. Always factor in changes to the game before concluding that an item is for sale, some items lose value over time and sometimes changes in the game can permanently drop the value of items.

My Realm’s Economy Is Screwed Up, I Can’t Make Gold In It

I’ve heard this several times. Most of the people who complain are complaining because they are experiencing extreme price fluctuations. You actually want to see these, they are what let you make gold. The people who complain about them are those who made the mistake of buying high and not being patient enough to wait for prices to come back up before selling their inventory. In conclusion, you can make gold on any realm’s Auction House. I have been successful on low, medium, and high population realms and there’s no reason for you to get discouraged if you’re struggling on your realm, it’s not your realm’s fault.

I Don’t Have Enough Time to Make Gold, I’m a Casual Player

A lot of people simply don’t have time to farm, they would rather raid, do dungeons, daily quests or just chill in the Barrens telling Chuck Norris jokes. That’s actually good news, because you can make a lot more gold per hour if you only spend 30 minutes a day checking the Auction House. In the 3-4 hours you spend on the Auction House per week (spending about 30 minutes per day) you can make 2-5,000gold without much thinking. That’s an average of over 1,000 gold an hour! If you don’t have a lot of time then you need to start by focusing on this part of the guide.

Prices Always Go Down Because People Keep Undercutting Each Other

This can’t possibly be true, if it were everything would be free, right? It might seem obvious to you but this is a common misconception people have when they only play during peak hours. During these hours most prices have a tendency to either plummet or go up rapidly. They will adjust, trust me. You don’t always have to undercut, each time you post an item you have to figure at what price it will sell and undercutting is only effective if you’re posting in your desired price range.