Making Money With Enchanting

Making money through disenchanting

This method follows the usual pattern for most professions, scan the AH and compare buy and sell prices. The general idea is to buy a magic item, disenchant it, and sell the resulting materials for a higher price than the items price. Example:

The current AH price for [Arcane Dust] is 2.5g A green lvl 63 armor item is available for a buyout of 4g Disenchanting this item usually results in two Arcane Dust Therefore, a gain of 1g is possible by buying the item, and selling two dusts

This calculation can be done manually, but the mods Enchantrix or Fizzwidget's Disenchant Predictor automate this, and include the current AH value of items in their disenchanted form in the tooltip.

Unfortunately, on most servers, there are a lot of enchanters trying to make money using this approach, therefore the spread (between item price and disenchant value) is usually rather low. With time and commitment though it's possible to find bargains and/or a niche (like lower-level materials). This is basically the same with all items traded on the AH - supply and demand may fluctuate, a good feel for the market dynamic helps gaining profits.

Disenchanting involves some randomness. Items generally do not disenchant into a fixed number of materials, rather there are probabilities involved. Particularly the chance that green items may produce shards is interesting. Therefore, even when the split is small, it's possible to make a profit with these lucky disenchants. Some players who are not enchanters themselves like to keep all items they collect, and then have them disenchanted. This is not a source of substantial income though.

Making money through enchanting

Selling enchantments is possible, but rather difficult. First of all it suffers from the unique problem that buyer and seller must meet in person, it's impossible to sell or buy an enchant in the AH. This requires quite some commitment from the enchanter, standing in one of the major cities and repeatedly advertising in the trade channel. The second problem is that most enchants don't sell well. The low-level enchants are not good enough to be worth the effort, most players start enchanting their gear only after they hit the level cap. Even then, only the rare, top-of-the-line enchants can be sold with a profit. The problem with these receipes is that they are usually available only through running the harder instances, which in turn usually requires membership of an endgame raiding guild.

In summary, for players planning to be member of a raiding guild, enchanting is a good opportunity to get extra income. For solo or casual players though it's difficult to obtain the rare receipes, and thus hard to really earn money.

When trying to sell enchants, there are a few rules which make life easier (for both, the enchanter and the customers):

Don't spam. Repeating an advertisment more frequently than once per minute is not helpful, once in 5 minutes actually suffices in most cases.
Make the advertisment short but informative. Don't try to include every enchant available, three of the top enchants is enough.
Include the information whether the price includes materials ("my mats"), or whether the customer has to provide them ("your mats").
The least invasive method is to sell the enchantments reactively, that is to wait until somebody asks for an enchant.
On Tuesdays, many players spend their newly awarded arena points for new gear. On weekends, more players overall are online. Both are good opportunities to sell enchants.

Popular enchantments needed by other players (subset)

+81 Healing on weapon: - All healers want this.
+30 Healing on gloves: - All healers want this too
+20 damage/healing on gloves: - Popular with DPS spellcasters
+12 stamina on boots: - Drops in mana Tombs, popular with all classes and pretty rare
+20 strength on gloves: - Most warriors want this.
+6 stats on chest: - surprisingly popular all around

Tips

The most cost-effective method of first leveling enchanting is to do nothing but disenchant items until skill level 60, which is when disenchanting no longer yields skill points.

As an early Journeyman enchanter, creating Greater Magic Wand (vendors for around 15 silver) is rather cheap, and sometimes may even be sold for a slight profit.

Although it's a waste, there is no way to avoid spamming the same enchant on the same item over and over again if trying to level enchanting in a time-efficient way. Low-level enchants are in such low demand that they are frequently not even wanted for free.

It helps a lot to buy green items from friendly players (or guild mates) at the vendor price (or slightly more, or, if they're very friendly, for free).

Tailoring is often suggested as a secondary profession to enchanting because finding cloth does not require a secondary tradeskill, and this combination of crafts permits to convert the cloth found on mobs into enchanting materials. Looking at this strictly from a cash-flow point of view, taking a collecting craft like herbalism, skinning or mining yields more profit, because selling all the collected resources plus cloth and buying cheap magic items from that money effectively yields more materials than the method using tailoring.

Prior to level 54, Artisan enchanting (300) and some later enchanting recipes can only be obtained in Uldaman from Annora. For higher-level characters, there's an enchanting trainer in Shattrath.

In summary, enchanting is a rather expensive craft to learn, and difficult to level up in the early game. It is recommended for players in guilds, or for an alt with a higher-level main that can feed items to the enchanter.