30 Minutes a Day Project - Day 28 Wrap Up

Well, I finally made it to the end of the project with only 4 days missed. Now for me, that's actually pretty darn good and I only missed those days due to being in hospital so I'm quite pleased with myself for that. However, I am also not so pleased with myself about how much I didn't make this month!

I listed the last lot of stuff at the end of Day 27 without really caring or watching how much I was listing for. And wouldn't you know it? As soon as I stop trying so hard, I have my best day of the whole month! When I emptied the mailbox this evening, I picked up almost 570 gold. I still have a bunch of stuff left to sell but only enough to fill my backpack so really, I think I timed that pretty well too.

Just for information, I thought I'd include the My Sales addon summary screen for the month so you can see where I made the most sales this month. Now obviously, this doesn't show profit but I was really lucky through the month and I'm not sure I made many losses all the way through the project.

I have to say, I think I really lucked out with doing this in December! I didn't even consider the Winter Veil festival when I had this idea but of course, Strange Dust is top of my sales list and I'd hazard a guess that it was almost all profit too! The Rugged Leather and Wool Cloth sales were bonus markets from Winter Veil too but I quickly fell into a habit of checking the herb market first and with the time limit, I mainly stayed with flipping herbs.

I did occasionally venture into other markets but too late in the month to show up on the top sellers list. The few recipes I picked up early on didn't sell very well although they did sell eventually. I wonder if I should have gone to get more and keep trying with those. 

So in the end, 28 days for 15 minutes a day should have resulted in  7 hours played time. As I found out very quickly, 15 minutes to do all the AH stuff is ok but it didn't give me time to record all the transactions so my actual played time is shown above at almost 14 hours. That means I spent about 30 minutes a day logged in but that was not just recording & making transactions. I also have some very chatty realID friends so a bit of that time was chat time too!

I did enjoy this project but I also found it very frustrating. I started it because I needed some kind of impetus to log in & do something productive but once in game, my natural inclination is to hang out in the Auction House for hours, just scanning for deals and absorbing price information so the time limit drove me crazy!

I hope you've found a bit of useful info somewhere in this diary of a newbie banker and just in case you're wondering, the closing balance of gold in her bag was 1713 gold. Not very good at all by my expectations but still not too bad given the restrictions.

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30 Minutes a Day Project - Days 16 - 18

I'm A Tree!

It's a few days before Christmas and I've missed 4 days so far. I knew I'd be missing a few days due to my operation so that was kind of planned for but I did think it would only be 2 days! So day 16 is actually 20th December in case you were wondering.

Day 16

Today's mailbox held over 200 gold for me and a lucky Blingtron drop gave me another 25 gold. I went a bit crazy with the Spirit Dust but as there was a shedload available at well below usual prices, I thought it was worth a little gamble.

I did the Gaudy Winter veil Sweater to Strange Dust thing again too but I wasn't really in the mood to scour the Auction House for deals so I just relisted stuff that hadn't sold and called it a night.

Day 17
I logged in hoping to see lots of gold in the mailbox from last night's listing and I wasn't disappointed. With sales of almost 290 gold, it was a relief to see all the Spirit Dust sold and the Strange Dust too. I had a look at the herbs category again but it seems with the influx of players for the holiday week, herb prices are stabilising and although there were plenty of cheap herbs, there weren't any obvious gaps to take advantage of.

What do I mean by 'gaps' - well, when I see a few herbs, say Silverleaf, listed at 9 silvers and the next listing is for 20 silvers, I would normally buy the few cheap ones and just undercut the 20 silver listing - that way, I'm kind of moving the bottom of the market up and closing the gap. When there is a wall of herbs in the 9, 10, 11, 12 silvers range though, there often isn't much of a gap to close so for the purposes of this project, I leave those alone.

If I didn't have a time limit or an end date to this project, then I may very well buy them all up and just sell them at my leisure when the prices are better for profit making. That's something you can do as a newbie gold maker but apart from the fact that I haven't spent any gold on bigger bags or increasing my bank storage space, I just don't want to be left with a bunch of herbs to store at the end of this project.

One of the things about gold-making is having patience and time. Having the patience to buy and not be in a rush to sell can make a huge difference to your profits. It's about timing too - listing your cheap purchases when the market price has risen and not listing them when there's no profit to be made. I know that seems really obvious but you'd be surprised! Some people say that holding stock and waiting is a pain, they'd rather sell them again, even for a loss just to get the gold back in their pocket to re-invest. I've had in-game friends who wanted to learn but didn't have the patience to just wait it out.

Now don't forget, I am talking low price stuff here - if you've bought something expensive to try to flip, knowing when to cut your loss is another skill. It may sometimes be better to sell at a small loss if you can see that prices are dropping steadily and your loss is only going to get bigger. It is possible for markets to bounce back of course but often, they will never bounce back to their original levels to make you the profit you were hoping for.

Day 18
Not so many sales today but given that I didn't really list much extra stuff yesterday, that's understandable! I'm definitely a casual gold maker and with Christmas looming, my energy to play seems to be fading. Still, the Strange Dust is proving to be very lucrative for this baby banker so as long as the market stays steady, I'll keep disenchanting those horrible sweaters!

Having said that, I did an Auctioneer scan today and didn't end up with much time left so I just listed everything in my bags and gave up. This is definitely not the proper way to make gold you know!

I'm nudging ever closer to 1000 gold and although I'll be pleased to reach that, overall I'm really disappointed with my efforts so far! I don't remember it being this hard last time I did a challenge like this but then I haven't been playing so much at the top levels or even leveling alts much recently so my knowledge of markets is definitely rusty!

I can certainly find loads of cheap stuff to buy but without knowing my mid-level profession markets and what stuff is still useful, I feel kind of lost. I used to sell Globe of Water, Essence of Air, Spider's Silk etc, knowing that they were in high demand for various specific patterns or recipes. With the introduction of Pet Battles, the Globe of Water market is dead (used in the Engineering pet, Tranquil Mechanical Yeti) as the pet is not that desirable anymore. With the introduction of additional heirlooms and changes to PvP, Spider's Silk is also pretty dead - it was used for several Tailoring and Leatherworking low level patterns for the Twink markets.

This is where research comes in - I may not have the current knowledge but knowing where to find information is the next best thing! Looks like I may have to spend some time, racking my brains and checking stuff out on The Undermine Journal! I may have to leave that for the next project though as I do have family time commitments over the next few days. Arrgghh why is there never enough time?? lol

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30 Minutes a Day Project - Days 4 - 6

I have hit a small problem & I'm going to have to change my own rules already! That's the trouble with sitting down & writing - sometimes you need to actually do a thing before the pitfalls show themselves!

So, I haven't been able to stick to just the 15 minutes a day then log off idea - I didn't take into account my lovely friends who are so pleased to see me back in game, they all want to talk to me - at the same time! I also didn't take into account how long it takes for me to write down everything I'm buying or listing either so I have found a way around this but you guys are going to have to trust me on my playtime. 

Within WoW there is a timer/stopwatch function so rather than doing /played to see how long I have left in a session, I have the timer on my screen. That way, when I stop to chat or write stuff down, I can stop the timer & restart it when I'm actually doing WoW stuff. It does mean that a /played screenshot is meaningless though - I tried it last night - I actually only played for 15 minutes but I was online on that character for about 40 minutes! 

Day 4
Day 4 for my banker went much more smoothly than the previous few days, that's for sure! I logged in to find 1g 13s in the mailbox waiting for me but sadly the 3 Peaceblooms were returned. So now that I had a little gold to play with, I ran back to the Alchemist supplies lady in the Mage Quarter & she had a load of herbs for sale. I spent a whole 9s 12c on them, ran to the Florist on the outer edge of the Trade District and he had a bunch of herbs for me too so I spent another 4s56c there.

Off I ran to the Auction House to see what the prices were like. Now that I had some cheap herbs to sell, I felt much better & I was very happy to see the high prices from yesterday were still in force.

I just had enough time to list them before logging off. Here's hoping they sell at those prices!

Day 5

What a disappointing result - logged in to find only 1 sale and that was the Peacebloom so I'm now 22s24c better off at least. Ran to both the herb supplies places and nabbed some more cheap limited supply herbs but as I had 1 gold already, I ran to the Cooking Recipe guy in Stormwind Old Town too. In the past, I would have bought one of each of all the recipes available but with the changes to leveling cooking in Mists of Pandaria, I just bought 3 of the recipes - Seasoned Wolf Kebab, Crocolisk Gumbo and Crocolisk Steak to test the market.

Did a vendor scan of the Auction House too - only 5 items turned up at 99% of vendor price and all beyond my available cash right now. I'm beginning to think this server has some intelligent AH players on it but I'm holding judgement on that for now!

So this is where I left it at the end of Day 5 - you can see how expensive everything is, even this low level herb stuff. I wanted to try a high pop server so I guess I'm learning that huh? lol

Day 6

So I had a few sales today when I logged in - not as many as I had hoped but at least it's a start! This is beginning to feel very embarrassing too - I'm supposed to be a gold maker & 5 days in I barely have 10 gold! So the mailbox gave me 3g74s and a lucky Blingtron drop gave me a further 6g20s. I was a bit fed up today so I just fished for 10 minutes to see what kind of return that would give me. I got my fishing skill up to 50 which netted me a whopping 11s70c! Guess who won't be doing that anymore!

The tips have been coming in on Twitter and via email too although some for now are beyond my cash limit. One conversation with Gimp of Gimp's Gold blog did remind me why I used to like Auctioneer so tonight I'm going to re-install that & give it a try! I'll let you know how that goes in the next update!

As for leveling my Shaman, she's poodling along slowly but I think I'm going to take her out of the 15 minute time restriction. I don't think I'll be playing her for hours on end but 15 minutes questing really is too short to get any kind of visible progress. She's only just got to Kharanos so I think what I'll do is limit her to 2 hours per week. That way it's still a limited time thing but if I feel like it, it's in bigger chunks. I may actually get something done then! Also because she's moving so slowly, I haven't actually had anything to send to my banker from her adventures so that has to change too!

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20 Days of Gold Making - Day 3

Today is Day 3 of my 20 Days of Gold Making & the question is  "What were the first techniques/tips/tricks you used when starting out?"

This sounded like such a good question when I made the list but now that I sit down & try to write about it, it's kinda tough! It was a fair while ago now after all. 

Sell Everything

I think I was selling everything almost from the very start of my WoW time - grey stuff to vendors & everything else to the Auction House. I was lucky that I had a friend or two already playing for a few months so they had told me about the Auction House. I didn't have any Auction House addons to start with though - every green piece of gear I picked up, I would manually look to see what range of prices equivalent items were selling for & price my item in the same range. I don't remember how successful this was but I did it for a fair while so it can't have been too bad.

Learn a Profession

I have no idea how profitable this would be these days but my first character had skinning & leatherworking. I used to craft stuff to get skill points but instead of disenchanting it as so many do these days, I put all my crafted stuff on the AH. Yes, even those level 10-15 basic green items. I used to have a notebook with my calculations in & I remember pushing the prices up by 10-20 silver each time I had to replenish my crafted stock!

Alliance Cooking Recipe Vendor

I found this guy in Stormwind during the Pilgrims Bounty holiday within the first few months of starting to play. I left my rogue in Stormwind specifically to buy the recipes & put them on the Auction House. Up until Mists of Pandaria arrived, I would still periodically buy a bunch & sell them easily for 20g or more each. I haven't tried in Mists as you can now level cooking in Halfhill so easily. It was also a great way to boost cash on a new server too.

Read, Listen, Talk to Other Goldmakers

This was the big one for me - finding gold blogs like Cold's Gold Factory & JMTC really opened my eyes to the wider WoW world. I had no idea there were so many blogs out there about WoW, let alone specific gold making ones. Needless to say, I read everything - I even went back right to the beginning of both CGF & JMTC and read all their old posts too.

I found Twitter & started following a few well known people & from there I found out about these things called podcasts. JMTC had it's Friday night chat thing, Auction House Junkies was just starting around that time, as was Power Word: Gold & these days there's Eviscerated Gaming Podcast too.

Now I'm one of those gold makers & people talk to me via Twitter, comments here & emails - I love it although looking back, I never thought it would turn out like this!

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20 Days of Gold Making - Day 1

Here we go then - day 1 of my 20 Days of Gold Making. Todays question is 'when did you start gold making & what triggered it?'

I found the lure of gold very early on - in fact, if I remember correctly, I had enough gold for my riding training & mount at level 20 by the end of my 10 day free trial just by questing & selling vendor junk. It helped that I had about 6 different alts all running through starter zones in those 10 days so when I finally took the plunge & converted to a full account, all I had to do was send all the gold to my main.

I didn't set up a specific banker alt straight away but I did allocate one of my lesser played alts to be the auction house alt. As I was only questing at this point, any useful items were checked for sale price at the AH & sold if possible. I do remember clearly finding the cooking recipe vendor in Stormwind & selling loads of those recipes during that first Pilgrim's Bounty holiday. 

I used to keep a daily note of how much gold each alt had - I'm an accountant by trade so keeping track seemed natural & obvious to me. I remember lending 6000 gold to a newish guild member whilst my main was questing in Hellfire. I had all sorts of whispers from my closest guildies, telling me I was silly to trust this guy, what if he didn't pay me back etc but that 6k was only a small chunk of what I had already accumulated & I knew I could easily write it off if he didn't repay me.

2 months into my Wow career :)

My faith in him was rewarded though - he had needed the gold to dual spec so he could fill a gap in the raid team & once he had done that & upgraded his gear properly for raiding, he spent about a week just farming to make gold to repay me. He sadly left guild a while later to join a more aggressive raiding team - we were definitely not serious raiders! I mean we raided regularly but when your 2 healers are prone to giggle fits & the tank is a funny guy, things tend to break down a little, you know?

Anyway, fast forward to August/September 2010 & I found myself guildless & very very lonely in game. Cataclysm was coming but without a guild, I didn't know quite what to do with myself so I turned to the Auction House. It wasn't a conscious decision but as with any new project, I threw myself into it. If you go back & read my very first post here, you will see I thanked Cold & Markco for their useful blogs which I found in those first weeks of my gold making endeavors. From there, I found loads more, created my Twitter account & generally started soaking up information like a sponge!

By the time Cataclysm arrived, I had about 60,000 gold, a specific bank alt & a whole arsenal of markets, professions & tricks to run. Just before Cataclysm arrived, I rejoined my old guild but it was a very different guild with all the raiders having left overnight. I continued to pretty much run solo with occasional guild dungeon runs but I was so busy making gold, I kind of lost interest in social playing! I started this blog in the December & pretty much haven't looked back since.

Edited to add: Cold over at Cold's Gold Factory runs a monthly blogging carnival and in support of my 20 Days of Gold Making, has made Day 1 the topic for the February Carnival. Thank You Cold, for all your help & support xxx

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Quick Basic Tip to Find Great Deals on Auction House

© JD Hancock, used under Creative Commons License from Flickr

Just a quick post today relating to a happy accident I had this week. I was going to list my few Firefin Snapper, but the starting price was only 7 coppers! When I looked at the details in the Auctionator Buy tab, there were a few others too - also in the mere coppers sell price. So I grabbed them up & relisted them straightaway with my own Snappers.

Now I could have left it at that but then I wondered if the same person had listed anything else this cheap. I haven't worked out a quick way to see all of a players auctions within the game yet (although you can on The Undermine Journal) so I just did a general search on some of the Trade items. Auctionator will let you search all the herbs at once & sort them by price. Sure enough, there were a whole load of herbs listed at mere coppers.

So what does a good goblin do? Buy them all up of course! You can see from my screenshot that I also managed to snag some wool & medium leather too. Ignore the Cinderbloom in the screenie - that was cheap on the day although prices have plummeted since then!

So here's the screenshot of my auctions page after I relisted all my bargains! This is just a part of the haul that day but 5 briarthorn for 5 silver flipped to 7 gold is the kind of flip I like! I've been double checking the general searches I created that day & have since picked up quite a bit of other stuff posted at similarly stupid low prices.

Now before you say anything about why a WoW millionaire is messing with this low value stuff, this is on my US account. I don't have any professions sorted out yet, no heirlooms or much cash so this is how I make a lot of my starter cash. I'm posting this as a lesson for any newbie goldmakers out there. It's a two part lesson as well - how to search for stuff to flip & also a cautionary tale of watch your listing prices when you post your own auctions!

If you've just installed an auction house addon like Auctionator, Auctioneer or TSM (Trade Skill management), double check your settings & watch those listing prices like a hawk at first. There are many tales of woe amongst the gold making community of items listed at the wrong price - a forgotten 0 on an epic armour item or mount price is a very expensive lesson to learn!

Vendor Herb Supplies for Making Starter Gold in WoW

Herbs in Boots

So I've mentioned before about buying some herbs from various vendors to sell on the Auction House for starter cash but whilst I was farming recently, I stumbled over Vi'el in Winterspring & found that he sells Gromsblood. I was there for a little while so I managed to raid his limited supply 3 times & ended up with 8 Gromsblood. When I went to the Auction House with them, they were listed at around 15 gold each!

That got me thinking about what other herbs might be available from vendors so I spent a little while on Wowhead having a look & decided to summarise them here. As I expected, there aren't many higher level herbs available from vendors but the ones that are available are usually expensive on the Auction House so may be worth picking up if you're in the relevant areas.

Starter Cash - Alliance

Stormwind, Maria Lumere, Alchemy Supplies, Mage Quarter
The Exodar, Altaa, Alchemy Supplies, Vaults of Lights
- sells peacebloom, silverleaf, earthroot, mageroyal, bruiseweed, wild steelbloom, kingsblood and liferoot (40 copper to 1silver 20copper)

Stormwind, Bernard Gump, Florist, outer edge of Trade District, Old Town side
Elwynn Forest to Redridge, Antonio Perelli, travelling salesman
Wetlands, Kixxle, by a cart at junction of main road & the road to Dun Modr in the North
 - sells earthroot, mageroyal, bruiseweed, wild steelbloom, kingsblood and liferoot (80 copper to 3silver)

Starter Cash - Horde

Silvermoon City, Melaris, Alchemy Supplies, nr Court of the Sun
- sells peacebloom, silverleaf, earthroot, mageroyal, bruiseweed, wild steelbloom, kingsblood & liferoot (40 copper to 1 silver 20 copper)

Northern Barrens, Hula'mahi, The Crossroads
Ghostlands, Rathis Tomber, near Tranquillien
Tirisfal Glades, Selina Weston, Brill
- sells peacebloom, silverleaf, earthroot, mageroyal, bruiseweed (40 copper to 1 silver )

Higher Level Areas

Winterspring, Vi'el, Exotic Goods, Frostwhisper Gorge - sells Gromsblood 10silver

Netherstorm, Dealer Sadaqat, Stormspire
Isle of Quel'Danas, Mar'nah
- sells icecap, felweed, dreaming glory, netherbloom & mana thistle (10-60 silvers)

My New Server Start Up Process

When I start on a new server, I usually level a banker alt to level 5 before running them to Stormwind (my bankers are nearly always human!). On average, my alt leaves Northshire with around 9 silvers & I run her straight to Maria Lumere, the alchemy supplies girl in the Mage Quarter. Watching my pennies, I buy whatever herbs she has available, making sure I still have 1 silver left for each type of herb I buy so the Auction House listing fee is covered. So if I can get 3 types of herb from her, I must keep back at least 3 silvers to be able to list them!

Then I go and create my new character that I'm going to play & level her for a while. Once she has done a little questing, she will start to pick up linen & other bits that I can sell - I post them to my bank alt & often add a little cash too - after all, she doesn't have anything left until those initial auctions sell.

Depending on what time of day I am playing, I will often log in & out of both alts quite a bit at first - getting the questing going & sending stuff across to sell then logging banker to get all these goodies listed. This way, I also see when the initial herbs sell & pick up that extra cash quickly.Then it's back to the alchemy supplies & off to the florist to pick up whatever herbs I can & get them listed too.

Rinse & repeat until you have a nice little stash of gold then I hit the cooking recipes guy in Stormwind Old Town - approx 1 gold will get you about 10 recipes - all of which sell for anywhere between 2 - 30 gold each although they don't sell as quickly as they used to.

So there you go, an easy & fairly painless way to get those first dribbles of cash into your pockets on a new character. To my more experienced readers - Is this what you do or do you have another method of getting that initial cash?

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