My first recommendation to you is to install a good 3rd party MOD that will assist you at the Auction House. The one that I like the most is one called “Auctioneer”.
This is a free mod that is priceless to you as someone who is trying to maximize your income. To download Auctioneer, simply go to http://auctioneeraddon.com/ and go to the Downloads section. Once you have the add-on installed, the first thing you will notice with this New MOD is that there is now a “Scan” button on the Browse tab of the Auction screen. You will want to run this scan at least once a day for about a Week so that it can build a database file of all items that are selling in the Auction House. Ideally, if you can do this once in the morning and again in the evening for about a week, it will cover just about every item that gets sold. Depending on the number of auctions running at the time, the scan can sometimes take upwards of 10 minutes.
I know this sounds like a long time but trust me, this is time very well spent. After a week of doing these scans, the database file should have all of the information you need to make good decisions when buying and selling items. It probably wouldn‛t hurt to run this every so often down the road to keep your database file up to date.
Now that you have your database file created and up to date with all the latest auction information, you are now ready to buy items cheap and then turn around and sell them right back for an UNBELIEVEABLE profit! We‛ll get into that more in just a bit.
Another feature added with this add-on is the Enhanced Tool Tip. When you hover over an item, as shown below in Figure 1, it will provide you with another smaller window that has additional information. As you can see this Is a Rare Pattern (Blue item) that is currently being sold at the Auction House for 8g 50s with a Buyout of 10g. Towards the bottom of the window, it lets you know that this item is sold by a vendor for mere 30 Silver. The vendor that sells this particular item is Rikqiz
This is VERY important information because It essentially is telling you that you can purchase a pattern for 30 Silver and In turn, sell the crafted item it makes at the Auction House for approximately 8-10 Gold. After the cost of materials, this is around a 2000% profit!!
For - Pattern: Gem-Studded Leather Belt
Just because it says that this item is sold by a vendor, doesn’t ‛ t necessarily mean that ‛ s the only place you can get it. If you remember from earlier, another person ‛ s trash is just waiting for you to buy it. When you spot items like this, you can search the Auction House for them to see if you can find them cheap. One of the things you probably have already noticed is that when you go to sell a pattern or formula, the auction defaults the starting Bid to a very small amount. You‛d be surprised at how many people don ‛ t bother to change these values or if they do, they still have it far below Market value.
In turn, you will constantly find all kinds of formulas, plans, and Patterns that are being sold for Silver by players who don ‛ t understand the Items they are selling.
What you should do is buy these items, run over to the nearest mailbox to collect the items, and then run right back to the Auction House to put them back on the market for a HUGE profit.
You can use the Auctioneer add-on to get the Suggested Starting Bid and Buyout that it recommends. You can also take a quick look at some of the other auctions for that same item.
If you find other auctions for that same item, make sure that you have a Buyout Price that is a little less than everyone else ‛ s auction.
If you are the only one selling that item, then you basically have a monopoly of that item in the Auction House allowing you to set your own price.
How does the Auctioneer know all of this information for these items you ask? The answer is the “Scan” feature that was discussed on the previous page, Just like the stock market, the economy in World of Warcraft is in a flux and is constantly changing.
That ‛ s what the Auctioneer specializes in, scanning the World of Warcraft economy and building a database of all items and their current value out on the market.
Something else nice about this Add-On is that even if you aren’t ‛ t at the Auction House, you can still see what is selling for a low price by running the /ah
Auctioneer broker command. This will return a list of items that have a Buyout of something that is far less than what the market is paying. This is a very nice feature to use for the times when you aren’t always near an Auction House because it will tell you if there is anything worth going back for.
The last feature of the Auctioneer Add-On that I would like to touch on is the new “Search Auctions” tab. This is by far the best feature of the Auctioneer. What this will do is scan all current auctions and compare against the information it has gathered in previous scans to show you what items are selling for and how much profit can be made on that item if you were to buy It and then re-sell it at the current market value.
An example of this can be found on the following page in Figure 2. You will see that there is a Book of Ferocious Bite , which has a Buyout of 40 Gold.
However, look at the 2nd column labelled “Profit”. This is telling you that based on scans of other auctions on your server, this item has a buyout that is a lot less than it should be … almost 15 Gold to be exact! What I do in these cases, is buy these items that show a large profit margin, and then turn around and sell them for the current market value for an EASY profit.
Below are some tips that will help when setting up your auctions:
Always have a Buyout set on your items.
How many times have you found an item that you were looking for in the Auction House but it didn’t have a Buyout?
I know that in most cases where this happened to me, I usually went off looking for other auctions sometimes willing to pay a little more to get the item now. That‛s exactly what everyone else is does.
So make sure that you always have a Buyout set. If you don‛t it will result in a lot of wasted money because you have to keep re- listing that item over and over or someone else might put in a very low-bid at the end causing you to lose a lot of profit. Setting a Buyout Price will also allow you to make money a lot faster because you won‛t have to wait the 24 hours to elapse before you can get your payday!
When you get your money faster, that allows you to take that money and turn it into more money.
When setting your Starting Bid, don't set it to a nice round number like 15 Gold. Instead, set it to something like 15 Gold and 47 Silver. This makes potential buyers think that is what the Auction House defaulted your item to and that it truly is worth that much. When setting your Buyout price, make sure you look at all other auctions to see what they are going for. Once you find the lowest Buyout price, make sure you set yours just a little bit lower. This is known as “Undercutting”.
When you do this, the next potential buyer that is looking for that item will definitely be buying yours before anyone else ‛ s for two reasons:
1) you set a Buyout
2) you have the lowest Buyout of all available auctions.
There is something else you will want to keep in mind relating to setting a Buyout Price. When other people ‛ s auctions do not have a Buyout Price and people aren’t bidding on their items, this will actually work to your advantage on the "Buy Low" part.
Because less people are interested in bidding on an item with no Buyout, you can search through these auctions that are about to end and put in a very low bid. You will be amazed at how cheap you can buy some nice rare items. This is even easier for you to do if you are doing this when the servers aren’t as populated.
I find the mornings to be the time when you have the least amount of competition bidding against you on these bargain auctions.
On top of rare items, be sure to keep a close eye on the high level formulas, plans, and recipes which are always very popular.
I highly recommend doing the 24 hour auctions instead of the 2 and 8 hour ones. The reason for this is that will save you time of having to collect the items if it doesn’t sell the first time and then go back and set up another auction to sell it. Another reason is different people play the game at different times of the day because other things get in the way of their life such as work and school.
When you have an auction that runs for the full 24 hours, yes it costs a little more to set up but by doing this it will be visible to all other players no matter what time of day suits them best.
Something else that I have found helpful when trying to sell an item at the Auction House is to post the item in the Trade Channel. This advertises your newly listed item to everyone in that major city. That Way, people won‛t just see your item if they are searching the Auction House for it, they will see it just by watching their Chat Window.
You will be surprised how many times your auction will end about 5-10 minutes after you started it simply because you notified people of the new item that is available.
Just remember that like the real world, the economy of the World of Warcraft is constantly changing.
It ‛ s all about Supply and Demand!
What this means is that there may be times where a really nice item normally sells for 100 Gold but because the market is saturated with that item at the moment, they may be selling for 50 – 75 Gold.
When this happens, you should store the item in the bank or send it to your alt for a couple days or so until the supply on the market has dropped. This is something that you will soon become an expert in as you practice the art of buying and selling more and more because you will learn how much certain items should sell for as well as which items tend to be the most popular.
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