Getting Started At The Auction House

 

© Nev 2008, Picking the Right Tools

I can't believe it's already been a week since I posted the first part of my starter guide but I hope you have been doing your Auction House scans & selling everything you've been picking up whilst levelling. Today I thought I'd delve a little deeper into things that you can do with the Auctioneer addon from the very start of your WoW gold making career.

Along the bottom of your AH window, Auctioneer has added a few tabs, one of which is 'Searches', click that & you get a whole new menu of choices, some of which I use often & some I've never touched! First up for the very new AH player is the Vendor Search. When you have almost no gold & need to find those little deals that soon add up, this would be my suggestion.

This search runs through your scanned data looking for auction listings below the Vendor Price of the item so if you can get a few items from this search, you will be guaranteed a little profit. You'll be buying/bidding on items that you will immediately run to the vendor & sell = instant cha-ching!

You need to run your FastScan immediately before running these searches - it's not a real time search, it works from your scan data, so if you've just run your scan, the data should be all nice & fresh for you. In the menu on the left hand side, click Vendor & just accept the settings page as they are. I believe the default is 10copper for the minimum profit which is fine when you are just starting out. Next, click the search button at the bottom of the menu area & wait a few moments.

Vendor Sale Search

So what do you see in your results page - obviously the item name, profit, seller, left, buyout & bid columns are easy but what is PCT column showing you? That's the percentage column, the lower the figure the better as it's the percentage of the average price seen by your multiple scans. The reason column is telling you to bid or buy the item - usually for Vendor searches, it will say Bid but occasionally, you will see a Buy which will usually give you less profit but will guarantee you get the item for the calculated profit shown in the Profit column. 



I know when I start a new alt on a new server, I have maybe 8-10 silvers in my pocket by the time I get to level 5ish so from this scan, I could only bid on the Thick Spider's Silk for 5silver 25 copper but unfortunately it has 48hrs left to run so there's little point. It will tie up your money until someone bids higher or you win but for 2s25c profit, that's not very optimal for our purposes. If you have a little more cash available, I would go for the Dense Stone auctions for 2 reasons - a) 30silvers profit from 20silvers outlay - pretty good & 2) experience.

This is where older players win, even when starting fresh on a new server. Dense Stones are pretty useless most of the time unless you are levelling Blacksmithing but they also have one other use - for converting to Dense Grinding Stones to be handed in at the Darkmoon Faire each month. Check your in-game calender for when the Darkmoon Faire arrives & see if it is in Goldshire, Thunder Bluff or Shattrath. I find I make more money when it is my local one although it always brings opportunities.

The Darkmoon Faire is not something that many players understand or use but as a Gold Maker, there are several ways to profit from it. I'll cover this in a later post as I'm kinda wandering off track a little here :)

Okay, so today's Vendor Search hasn't brought anything very useful to us so now click the Resale search option in the left hand menu. This also runs from your most recent scan so occasionally, you'll try to buy something but it won't be found. Don't worry, that just means someone has bought it between you scanning & running this search.


Resale Search Results

The results window looks exactly the same & the profit figure is calculated from the bid or buy price as listed in the reason column. You can sort any of these columns by double clicking in the column title box. In this screenshot, I have sorted by Buyout Price as we have very little cash to play with at this stage & I want to see the items I can afford at the top of my search results.

Later, when you have a fair bit more gold to play with, I would suggest you sort by the Pct column to get the best bargains, remember, the lower the pct figure, the better.

The Resale search is a little riskier for new players as you don't yet know what all those items are or whether they sell or not. Looking at this page of results, the Scroll of Enchants for 10silvers, giving 17gold profit look very tempting & if I had 1 gold to play with, I may risk 10silvers on one of them. Unfortunately armour, weapons & Enchanting Scrolls can be minefields for the inexperienced goldmaker so I'd suggest you stay away from them for now.

The Spider's Silk however is always a good buy, especially at anything less than 1gold. It has a very low drop rate & is used for 2 Leatherworking items & 2 Tailoring items that are very popular with Twinks (Flux has built a Glossary for terms that you may find confusing) & therefore is always in high demand.

Other good items to start out with is cooking recipes (although don't buy the lower level ones at the AH, you can easily buy them cheaper from a handy vendor, more on that later), raw materials like copper/tin ore, mageroyal & other herbs, leathers & hides and enchanting materials. You may have to pick the best time to list these items though because prices fluctuate wildly, especially at the weekend so don't invest too much of your starting capital at any one time.

Lastly for today, we have the Posting window - just click the Post tab at the bottom of the window to get to it then click an item in your bag that you want to sell & drag it to the little box at the top left.



posting window

Once I have my item in the top left box, I ALWAYS click Refresh at the bottom right. This will do a quick miniscan of just this item on the AH & give you a list of current auctions, their sellers & the current prices. It will also automatically calculate a Starting Price (for bids) & a Buyout price. In the left hand side, you can change the duration of your auctions (less time=less deposit cost) & also the stack size & number of stacks.

You can override the auctions prices by clicking & overtyping in any of the prices boxes & in this case, I probably would. You can see that there is only 1 stack of 20 at 97s 50c (in the Buy/each column) & then the next one is a part stack of 3 leathers for 1g each. All the others are higher & I would suggest in this case, to list yours just below the 2g 20s stack.

I always look at the Buy/Each column not the Buyout column. If I have an odd number of items or I want to sell in singles or 5's for example, I don't have to try to calculate my stack price or compare it to others, I just decide the single item price & let Auctioneer do the maths for me :)

The other thing to check EVERY TIME you post something, is the Bid starting price. Some people think that having a bid price of 10coppers is like Ebay & people will bid the price higher. Unfortunately, people rarely get into a bidding war as there is usually plenty of stock for everyone.

I ALWAYS put a Buyout price too - again, this is not Ebay & when people go to the AH, they usually want something right now, not in 12 hrs or 48hrs. In fact, my bid price is usually only maybe 5% lower than my Buyout price & sometimes even the same value on things like Netherweave Bags which move so fast.

So that's just about it for now - sorry it went on so long but it seemed silly to break this down to more than 1 post. A few days of these searches should help you get a little more gold flowing & without realising it, you'll also start getting a feel for the various items & prices which is every auction house addicts' secret weapon! Call it instinct or gut feeling, it's actually your brain working stuff out before you even consciously think about it and the only way to develop this is time & a little effort.

Good luck & happy gold making