Advanced Auction Houses

Think of the AH as a mini game within WoW with gold as the scorecard. To many players, that game would be boring but to a few of us it is worth playing. The benefits are that your character will have the very best enchantments available at all times. You can use pots and oils to enhance your effectiveness. You can help your guild and your guildees with donations. You and your alts will be sporting epics and enchantments and using pots and oils and be wicked solo and very popular in groups.

What does it cost to win the AH game? You need a starting fund of about 200 gold and about 30 minutes a day of time spent in the AH. You have to be willing to take some risks. By spreading your risks around you lower your total risk. Over a few months you will see a solid return on your investment.

The skills you need to sharpen in the AH are knowing what the fair price at the moment for a particular item is and predicting where the price is headed. Once you reach that point you can easily spot the bargains and know when to buy and when to sell. It may take a week or a month of watching the pricing before you have the confidence to invest your hard earned gold. That is not time wasted.

The timing cycles discussed earlier are still applicable but now you have some larger timing cycles to track. You have to watch out for major holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, March break etc as they break up the raiding schedule. Less raiding means fewer consumables used but the farming continues steadily. School summer holidays means more farming. These all influence pricing as it is based on supply and demand at the AH. The Darkmoon Faire also can affect pricing of certain items when it is active.

Other larger changes in your server are also important. On a server that is just reaching Molten Core raiding, you can expect the prices on fire resist gear and pots to rise along with the mats to make them. A mature server with many high level players may have a strong market for items that appeal to alts. As I write this I am anticipating the changes from new instances and the importance of nature resistance. A trader in the stock market pays attention to the business cycle and the news. An AH trader has to think ahead as well.

It is almost impossible to be an expert in pricing of every item at all times. It would take hours each day just to track the market. You need to specialize. I specialized in herbs and alchemy, but any category of items will work. Every day or two, I take the time to look at pricing of key herbs and potions to see how they are doing. If I spot any bargains I bid on or buy them out. I have no idea about equipment, leatherworking, tailoring, mining, enchanting, fishing or cooking pricing. I only pay attention to some herbs and some alchemy.

As stated before the key is to buy low and to sell high. It works even better if you provide a service like turning herbs into potions but it can work with just buying and selling. You have to be much sharper on your pricing when you are reselling as the AH fees will wipe out your profits very quickly. I used to sell on AH with pricing like 9/16 (13?) and now I sell at 12/14 (13) because I know the 13 much more accurately.

The initial fee that the AH charges for listing an item can get expensive if a lot of your items fail to sell. You should be targeting a sell through rate of over 50%. At that level, more than 50% of your listed items are selling in 24 hours. If you sell through rate approaches 80% then your prices are too low. Some items like nexus crystals have no initial fee. Players go a little crazy with pricing in those cases. They have nothing to lose.

You also have to understand the quantity of each item that is being used each day. If you know that roughly 8 stacks of major mana pots are being bought each evening then it allows you to get a better price as a supplier of major mana pots. You no longer have to sell at the lowest price. Say that 13g is the fair price for major mana and it is busy time in the AH just before major raiding starts. Say I saw a price listing in AH of 7, 9, 9, 10, 10, 15, 15, 15. There is no need to undercut the lowest price. I would buy the 7g stack and offer 3 stacks at 13g and probably sell them. The 9g is not worth buying and reselling as major mana cost 45s a stack to put in the AH for 24 hours. Too risky to buy and sell for thin margin. If the pricing in the AH was 11, 15, 15, 17, 17, 17 then I might put 5 stacks up for sale at 14g. If the listing were 10, 10, 11, 11, 11, 12, 12, 12, 18, 18 then I would not try to sell that day. The key is knowing that roughly 8 stacks are what your server is selling an evening at this time.

You have to know your market. If the market only buys 2 of an item a day on average then it is pointless to offer 10 of those items for sale at one time. In fact, if you offer 10 on the market a lot of buyers will stop buying as they anticipate a drop in market price with such an oversupply in existence.

With few exceptions, items that are listed for sale by your competition will eventually be sold. Maybe they won’t sell today or this week, but eventually the owner will drop the price and dump them. If they get tired of paying 45s to list their major mana pots at 18g then they may dump 20 stacks on the market at one time at 10g a stack. Such are the ups and downs of the market place. If they are desperate enough in their selling prices then an opportunity may be available to you to buy and resell.

It costs about 20g to create an alt with 12 or 14 slot bags, bank and a couple of bags in the bank. That can hold about 100 slots. I highly recommend creating a selling alt. My main manufactures potions for resale and mails them to my alt. The only things my alt does is sell items on the AH and mail gold back to my main. It keeps things simple and reduces the storage load on my main.

You can also invest in a stockpile alt that holds stuff for the long term. Investing in a stockpile of an item can be risky. If the price crashes or even just stagnates then you lose. If artha’s tears or elemental air ever skyrocket then I am going to make a killing. Early in my career I stockpiled a lot of elemental items and did well on fire and earth but other items were dogs. Since then I learned to specialize more. The biggest risk I ever took was stockpiling 200 stacks of dreamfoil. Yes 4,000 dreamfoil or enough to fill two alts bags and their banks. I did well but sold out long before dreamfoil reached its current silly price on my server. I had so much gold invested in dreamfoil I had to delay the purchase of an epic mount for over a month. Sorry, I wont tell you what I am stockpiling at the moment but it wouldn’t help you very much anyways as each server is unique.

Stockpiling allows you to ride out the price fluctuations of day-to-day and week-to-week. If the price of dreamfoil skyrockets then I just use my stockpile to continue to offer major mana pots in the AH. When the price of dreamfoil crashes then I refill my stockpile. In a sense stockpiles is provide server stability on prices.

Mods

There are some popular mods out there for AH trading. I know some players swear by them but they never worked well for me. They also take away the fun factor. The thrill of finding a great deal on the AH is gone. If many people are using the same mod then your profits from running that mod will be minimal. As mods are constantly changing my comments here may be quickly out of date.

Auctioneer tracks pricing history. It finds deals on the AH for you. The problem is that it fails if prices are declining. In the early days of WoW prices were rising steadily. Auctioneer tells you that a particular item is a good buy but it turns out that it only looks cheap compared to what it was selling for a month ago. It is also very slow on a laggy server. As far as I know every server is laggy. When Auctioneer was creating error messages on my screen deep inside BWL I removed it.

I am currently using Auctionit. It has some interesting features and does speed up things a bit. It helps you offer multiple items for sale at the same price by filling in the pricing details for you after the first auction is created. Unfortunately, it is out of date and doesn’t save its settings very well because of a conflict. It has no ability to find deals for you on the AH. That is fine as I am capable of finding my own deals.