My Auction House Methods!
A few posts ago I explained my current situation and how farming and daily quests really aren’t an option for increasing my gold income. However, like everything in this world or the real one, stuff costs money. I have a plethora of alts to train and level professions on not to mention flying/epic flying/cold weather flying etc. To this end I began investing a little time on the alliance AH. I started with about 9k 5 months ago and my goal was 50k, which I passed a while ago.
My main source of income is BOE armour and weapons of all levels, from level 5 uncommon swords to the craftable 80 epics and I’m currently averaging 1-2k profit per weekend on my server (which is very high population). It’s not the fastest way of making gold, but it can also be a nice sideline to your farming/questing/dailies.
A lot of people bemoan playing the auction house, saying it’s too cut throat and there’s little profit. This really only applies if you are targeting the obvious markets of gems/enchants/glyphs/flasks. Of course, there is money to be made there, but to succeed in a big way you need to constantly undercut and relist which is very time consuming (even with addons)
My advice from here on is based on common sense and I hope I don’t come across too patronising when some of these tips are obvious ^^
Some general tips before beginning:
- The weekend (friday night to sunday night) is your best time to sell. People are levelling alts due to burnout/boredom and you also have less raids (generally) over this time. Plus bored people waiting for dungeons/raids etc hang around and shop for alts ^^
- I have only tried this method on my very high population server and I have a pretty large turnover of items. I’m sure the same principles will apply to high and medium population, but it probably won’t work on the lower population servers as there simply isn’t the volume of items to buy.
1. What you will need
- Auctioneer/Auctionator – any addon that lets you see the % of items list price against it’s value
- A starting amount of gold (don’t need a lot, even 100g is enough to start)
- A bank alt or character through which you can sell items
- Some bag space and if possible bank space or your own guild bank
2. First Steps
- A few days auction house data using your preferred addon is handy, although you can operate without it
- Perform an up to date scan on your auction house of choice (I like IF myself)
3. What to buy
- Filter your search page to armour/weapons>rare/epic/uncommon, then sort by buyout with cheapest first
- If using auctioneer, look for the blue percentages (below 50%), these are your potential items for resale
- I find that chests and shoulders sell less well than other items due to heirlooms, but they can still sell ok if the stats are good.
- You will want to look at the armour type, whether it’s mail/cloth/plate etc and if the stats are relevant to the previous (cloth + agi/stre/defense = bad, for example) The same applies to weapons.
- A lot of vanilla items have fairly terrible itemisation but they can be worth buying if they have a surplus of one stat (say stam) over another useless stat (say int for warriors) This is especially true on rare items, as people love love love blues.
- Anything in the twink ranges (19,29,39,49,59) can be a great seller. I love twinks, they make me a decent amount of money 🙂
- If you’re on a RP server (and even on non RP ones), some things that could be vendored (such as low level white quality items and flavour texted grey ones) can often sell for decent amounts.
Things I find that sell well – Trinkets (except Darkmoon), shields, items with a fun proc, Northrend items dropped from rare mobs, early Northrend blues (68-74), offhands, +spellpower greens
Use these filters and look for this type of item!
4. What not to buy
- Anything pre TBC with the suffix Of The Whale. It sucks. Buy and disenchant if it’s super cheap but the resale is hard. Post TBC and Wrath, buy the cheap ones and disenchant for mats (my personal level is max 5g per item)
- I don’t spend more than 200g per single item unless it’s an absolute bargain and I’m positive it will sell again. This only really applies to epics and the market for such things is decreasing as we hit the current limit of gear.
- Avoid unrealistic sales. Again, the TBC and Wrath greens are great for disenchanting, but normally their prices are so high as to be difficult to sell on (they average anywhere from 10-50g on my server)
- Watch for multiples. People farming Stratholme, for example, with ensure a surplus of dungeon tier sets. They are great to buy for your alts at 5g but harder to sell on when the market is flooded.
- Avoid expansion crossover items. Vanilla items 58-60 don’t tend to sell well, same for TBC 68-70. On rare occasions you can sell an amazing item in those brackets but it depends if you have nostalgic players or vanilla guilds. Again, if they are cheap they can be disenchanted for mats.
Things that I find sell badly* -Most uncommon weapons (due to the amount of times weapons are upgraded), anything that can be replaced by an heirloom (chest/shoulders/weapon), old dungeon sets, items from crafting professions (as people tend to make in bulk and just want to get rid, so they are often very cheap)
*By badly, I mean they take longer to sell, thus costing more in relisting and time spent, rather than they don’t sell at all
5. Selling your items
- If you have done a recent scan, you can just relist your uncommon items on mass without checking the market again.
- For rare and epic items, I would double check that there’s none listed on the market below your intended price. It doesn’t hurt to wait a few days until there’s less competition.
- I sell at the market price and rarely mark up by huge amounts, but that’s just me ^^ I get annoyed when there are sellers trying to sell things for crazy inflated prices.
6. The fun part
- If I’ve got plenty of time, I’ll check my auctions a few times a day and look for new ones. I also like the pleasure of finding gold in my mail 🙂
- Inevitably, not everything will sell straight away. It can take a while for particular item to sell (I’m looking at you, Kang The Decapitator) but normally there is a buyer out there. That’s the element of risk you take with this way of making gold.
Happy Selling!
We like this ❤
Cramming In Strudel 
That’s a good guide, I really should try to do some AH playing cause I could use some extra gold and haven’t been able to bring myself to farming dailies and stuff for a while now. Nice post! 🙂
@Saga – Thanks! Took me about 5 days to write it as there was so much I had to remember to add.
Once you get started with it, it’s pretty easy to just log on, pick your items off the AH and put them back up in maybe 10-15 mins.
I’m also going to write a second part to this post about selling the more popular consumables (gems etc)