Auctioneer Tutorial UpdatePosted by xenith on March 22nd, 2010

Instead of a PDF download, the Auctioneer Tutorial is now a series of posts. Click here to read it.

The PDF is still available to anyone who still wants it in that format. Click here to download it or use the link in the ‘Stuff to Read’ section of the sidebar. Email signup is no longer required.

I’m going to be working on some updates for it to cover some of the changes to Auctioneer in the past few versions so look out for that!

Enjoy!

Auctioneer Tutorial – How to Auctioneer from A to ZPosted by xenith on March 18th, 2010

Auctioneer is a big, complex add-on and even when you know how the different parts work, it can be difficult to figure out a process that will make you gold without spending hours staring at the Auction House screen. So to get you started, I am going to outline the main steps you need to follow to get started. As you learn more about Auctioneer and the market on your server, you can adjust as needed. Don’t forget to refer back to the tutorial if you forgot how to do something.

STEP 1: Create low level mules and park one at an Alliance AH, one at a Horde AH and one of your main faction at a neutral AH. YOu will need a mule on the opposite faction on a different account or a friend on the opposite faction to help you transfer items. If you do not want to do cross-faction arbitrage, just create one mule on the faction of your choice. If you have gold on a main character, buy the biggest bags you can afford for your mules. If not, buy bags as soon as you make some gold.

STEP 2: Get 5-7 days worth of scans from each faction you are working on. Scan twice a day if you can but once will be ok.

STEP 3: If you GATHER or CRAFT, create batch posts for all the items that you sell regularly. If you are going to use DISENCHANT, MILL or PROSPECT arbitrage, set up batch posts for the products you will create using those skills. You will need to have at least one of the item in your inventory to set it up as a batch post item so collect the items and mail them to your main mule first.

STEP 4: Configure a RESALE and CONVERT searcher. You initial settings need to reflect how much gold you have to invest. If you only have a small amount, set your maximum item price and minimum profits low. As you build up your bank balance, you can increase these. Make sure that you SAVE the searchers for later use.

STEP 5: OPTIONAL – Configure an arbitrage search. Don’t forget that when you buy items using this searcher, you will need to mail them to your neutral AH mule on your current faction and have a character on the opposite faction (on a different account) buy it. You can then mail it to your opposite faction AH Mule and list it on the opposite faction’s AH. Phew. Sounds complicated but it really isnt and its very profitable!

STEP 6: Configure DISENCHANTING, MILLING, PROSPECTING if you have any of those skills. Make sure you set them up to return items appropriate to your current skill level.

STEP 7: Load and Run your searchers. Review the results and buy the items you want (or CTRL+ALT+SHIFT click Purchase to buy everything in the list.

STEP 8: If you identify items that you can profit from regularly on your server, add them to your SNATCH list. Enter a price threshold that you are sure will guarantee you a good profit at resale.

Now, when you have everything set up, on each visit to the Auction House on your mule, you will do the following:

1. Scan (Get All if it works well for you)
2. Run Searchers and make purchases
3. Collect purchased items from mail
4. Collect gathered, looted and crafted items that you have sent from your alts (including cross faction or from main characters) from mail
5. Convert, Disenchant, Mill, Prospect items
6. Batch Post gathered, looted or crafted items
7. Appraise and post additional items

If you want to learn more about Auction House gold making strategies, Mayley Winters has launched a complete video series that shows you how to master the Auction House. Check out my review here.

Auctioneer Tutorial – Improve Your Profits Using BeanCounterPosted by xenith on March 18th, 2010

The final tool that you get with Auctioneer Advanced is BeanCounter. All this module does is allow you to search your auction history for all you characters to see what items you have bought and sold and at what prices.

You can limit the information that BeanCounter displays to bids (yours) or auctions. You can also choose to list things like unsuccessful auctions.

You can use this tool to see how well certain items performed for you in the past and to help you decide if an item is worth continuing to buy. For example, you can check how many times you had to relist an item in the past and what it finally sold for. This might tell you that the item just does not sell well.

If you want to really be successful at making gold using the Auction House, BeanCounter is deceptively simple but is in factone of the most useful tools in the Auctioneer Suite, even though it is much easier to learn to use than the other modules (just search for what you want). The complex part comes in when you need to figure out what information to look for and then what you should do with it. You need to learn from your mistakes and then change your strategies. I have tried to show you the technical parts of actually using the add-on to help you in this tutorial, but the strategies have been simple; usually just help with default settings.

But you are certainly aware that there are much more interesting strategies you can develop and that goes beyond what I can tell you here. If you are serious, your next step should be to consult other Auctioneers – although don’t expect them to give away too many secrets – or move on to an advanced Auction house strategy guide.

Happy Auctioneering

Auctioneer Tutorial – Using Searchers and Filters in SearchUIPosted by xenith on March 18th, 2010

The Resale filter that we looked at in the last chapter finds items that you can resell at a profit without modification. The other profit searchers in SearchUI find items that you can buy, modify in some way and then sell at a profit. Most of these require your character to have a certain skill, like disenchanting or milling. The exception to this is Converter, which finds items that can be converted in some way with no special skills. For example, motes that can be combined into primals.

Auctioneer Disenchant Filter

Using  Searchers for Fun and Profit

The complete list of profit searchers is:

• Converter: convert items for profit without using a specific skill
• Disenchant: Disenchant items and sell results for a profit
• Milling: Mill items and sell results for a profit
• Prospect: Prospect items and sell results for a profit

All of these work in a similar way and their settings work just the way resale does. Just like resale, you need to set it up to work with your own situation.  In general, you should use all profit searchers that you have the skills for for maximum profits.

One setting to be aware of is the ‘Use custom levels’ option. This lets you search for items that you can convert using a skill that is in a specified skill range. For example, if your Disenchant skill is at 300, you can select Use custom levels, then set the Minimum skill slider to 0 and the Maximum skill slider to 300. Now the search will only return items that you can disenchant at your skill level. You can also use the Minimum skill slider to eliminate low level items from your search (although setting an appropriate minimum profit will take care of that more effectively). Once you are happy with your configurations, click Search to see your results.

Purchasing and ignoring works in exactly the same way as Resale.

Using Arbitrage Searchers to For Even Bigger Profits!

An additional profit searcher which works a little differently is Arbitrage. What Arbitrage does is find items that you can buy on your current faction and sell on auction houses of the opposite faction. This can be one of the best money making strategies you can use if you do it right.
You will need to use the neutral Auction Houses in Everlook, Booty Bay or Gadgetzan to transfer items. You will also need help from a friend or a second account because you cannot buy auctions that were posted by a character on the same account as the purchaser. The neutral AHs take a 15% cut so post your items at a low price and be very quick about having your friend or character on a second account purchase them. Leave it up too long and another player might come along and buy it. There are so called ‘Auction House Snipers’ who spend time doing just that. I suggest making your transfers at a quiet time for your server to reduce this problem.

When you use the Arbitrage searcher for cross-faction selling, you will need to make sure that you have several days of scans for BOTH factions if you want to get accurate results. While the whole process seems a bit involved, this is really a great way to make gold on the Auction House. Make sure that you have alts set up at all the Auction Houses that you want to trade on to save you time!

Save Time Using Snatch

If you really know the market for some specific items, such as certain crafting components and you know that the price can really fluctuate throughout the week, you can use the Snatch searcher to automatically find those items when they are listed below a certain price. You can add items from your bags to the snatch list and then set the price threshold or you can add an item from a search results list created by any other searcher.  Just select the item in a search list and click the Snatch button. To run the Snatch search, click Search on the Snatch page to show any item in your snatch list that is below the price threshold. Then alt+ctrl+shift click Purchase to buy all the items that it found.

Applying Filters

Filters are useful because they let you exclude classes of item that you never want to see listed in your search results for any searcher.

• ItemLevel: Filter the list by item level. Use to exclude low level items that don’t sell well or make much profit
• ItemQuality: Filter by item quality. Use to exclude gray items for example
• TimeLeft: Filter out items by auction time remaining. Useful if you are going to bid on resale items etc instead of buy out and you don’t want to have too long remaining when you can be outbid.

Saving and Loading Searchers

If you have created a search that you want to run over and over, enter a name for it click the Save button at the top of the Search tab.

When you want to run the searcher again, select the saved search from the drop down menu and click Load to load those search settings. Click Search to run the search as usual.

If you want to learn more about Auction House gold making strategies, Mayley Winters has launched a complete video series that shows you how to master the Auction House. Check out my review here.

Auction House MasteryPosted by xenith on September 16th, 2009

If you read my Auctioneer Tutorial and want to learn more about Auction House gold making strategies, Mayley Winters has launched a complete video series that shows you how to master the Auction House. This is brilliant for two reasons…

One..if a picture tells a thousand words, then a video tells ten thousand..or something like that! Mayley’s vids are professional, high def productions that show you exactly what to do to master the auction house and get rich without grinding. Over at her site, she has a great video showing exactly how she can make her first 1000g before level 5! Awesome stuff..unless you actually want to mine the amount of copper it would take most people to make that much before level 5 .

Two…This is the first professional guide that is dedicated to showing you how to make money on the AUCTION HOUSE. No questing, no grinding, no farming and no professions required. The Auction House is the fastest, most reliable, in fact the only really effective way to make gold without it becoming a full time job.

The  basic videos cover pretty much the same stuff as my Auctioneer Tutorial. The video format makes it a bit easier to see what you are supposed to do though. But then you get to the real good stuff.

The Advanced Videos

I loved the video that showed me how to figure out where i went wrong. Sometimes I follow the rules, use the Searchers and post my stuff for sale…but end up making little or no gold. Auction House Mastery taught me how to figure out where I went wrong and fix it.

Control the Market on Your Server

On every server there are a couple of Auction House pros who dominate the markets. They know a lot more than just how to use the add-on (although they know that too), they also know what strategies to use, what to buy, when to buy it, when and how long to post ot for and how much to charge. These are the people who always undecut you and who sell all their stuff while your auctions are still there a day later.

Learn the Winning Strategies

Mayley also explains some really advanced stuff like weekly and seasonal sales cycles. These are things most people don’t ever figure out and that most gold guides won’t tell you. But you can guarantee that the folks who are really raking in the cash on the AH are using this knowledge to their advantage (and to your disadvantage if you are trying to compete with them).

Check out the Auction House Mastery guide for yourself.

Auctioneer Tutorial – Search for Resale ItemsPosted by xenith on May 5th, 2009

The SearchUI module in Auctioneer is where things really start to get fun and where you can really start to learn how to make gold in WoW without grinding or farming.

The SearchUI module is the main module that you will use to implement the Auctioneer method to make fast gold without farming. This module doesn’t just let you search for items that are being sold at a low price, it lets you search for items that can be disenchanted, prospected or otherwise converted into other items that will sell for more and make you a profit. You can also have it automatically buy certain items if it finds them listed below a certain price.

In this part of Auctioneer 101, I am going to show you how to make gold in WoW by searching for Resale items. Head to the Auction House and click the Search tab to get started. From the Searchers list on the left (you might need to expand it), click Resale.

Auctioneer Search for Resale

Your first task is to decide how much profit you want to make on an item for it to show in the list. Profit is figured by taking the value of the item and subtracting the price it is listed at. The value is determined using the Price Valuation Method that you choose,  which we will discuss later. You will make the listed profit if you manage to resell the item for the listed value.

The minimum profit you want to make on an item to see it in your search is really up to you, but is related to how much gold you have to invest. If you only have a small amount, you will need to use a low value here to find items you can afford. If you have plenty of gold, you can set it higher to avoid wasting time on items that only make a few coppers.

You can also set what percentage of market price the item price has to be below using Min Discount. By default, only items that cost 50% or less of the full valued price of the item ( the value is determined using the Price Valuation Method that you select. I’ll talk about that in a bit). Leave it at 50% unless you have really slim pickings at that setting, then you can raise it a little if you need to. The higher this percentage is, the less profit you will make on items.

Next, you need to decide if you want to list Bid or Buyout items or both. Basically, if you select to Allow Bids, you will see all items that you can resell at a profit if you win them at their current bid price. This can be a very profitable strategy for the patient player. You will need to monitor your bids though, or you will be outbid often and lose the deal. If that sounds like hard work, you can still make great profits by only listing items that you can profit on if you purchase at the buy out price and resell. To do this, select Show Buyouts but not Show Bids.

Check Seen Count is an important option. This sets how often Auctioneer needs to have ’seen’ this item at auction before it will list it in the search. This helps to make sure that the data is accurate before Auctioneer will tell you that you can make a profit. Its also very important that you have a good weeks worth of recent, full scans before you start to use Search or your valuations will be wrong and your profits wont be what you expect. Use a Check Seen Count of at least 10.

Check the Enable individual maximum price option and then enter a maximum price for items you want to see in the search. Its no use listing 1000 gp items if you only have 100 gp to spend.

Price Valuation Method sets how the value of an item is determined. The value is used to figure out how much profit you will make. They work in pretty much the same way as their equivalents in Appraiser.

Setting it to Stats: Appraiser will automatically use the same method as the current pricing model selected in Appraiser. As with Appraiser, Market Value works for most situations and this is the one that I use. Unless you are very good at statistical math, you probably won’t use the others. Do not use VendMarkup for the Resale searcher. There is a separate Searcher that you can use to find items that you can sell to an NPC Vendor at a profit.

You should always leave the option to subtract AH fees and deposit from your profits enabled. You can select the auction duration that you usually use and the average number of times you re-list items to make sure the correct amount is subtracted.  if you select 48hr and 3x for these, Auctioneer will subtract the 48hr listing fee plus deposit multiplied by 3 from your estimated profit in the search result.

Now you can go ahead and click Search and see what items you can buy low and sell high. To bid or buyout an item, just select it an click Purchase. Auctioneer will buyout or bid based on the reason for listing it that is shown in the ‘Reason’ column.

CTRL + ALT + SHIFT + click Purchase will purchase all the listed auctions. Use with caution! Not Now can be used to remove items from the list for this session only. If you close and reopen Auctioneer, the item will be listed again in new searches. Ignore Price will permanently ignore items at that price and Ignore will permanently ignore all items of that type permanently.

You can also use Clear to empty the list completely. Use the tiny + button to show the full options window again and then use the tiny – button to  show the search results list again.

Now you can collect any item you bought out from the mailbox and use Appraiser to post them at a profit. Here is where using Stat: Appraiser will work out for you because you will be able to list the items at the same price the Search valued the item at,  so you will get the profit you expect.

This should give you a basic idea of how to use the Resale searcher. Other searchers work in a similar way but help you to figure out items that you can buy then disenchant and resell, prospect and resell, sell to a vendor etc. The filters help you limit the search results that you get back. We’ll see how to make gold in WoW with these in the next chapter.

If you want to learn more about Auction House gold making strategies, Mayley Winters has launched a complete video series that shows you how to master the Auction House. Check out my review here.

Auctioneer Tutorial – Advanced AppraiserPosted by xenith on May 4th, 2009

Now i’m going to show you how to make gold in WoW faster using Batch Posting in Appraiser. I’ll also go into details on configuring undercutting to make the most gold while still ensuring your stuff sells and finally I’ll show you how to set up your inventory list so that the whole selling process is easier and faster.

Batch posting is the biggest time-saver on the Appraiser tab and is great for crafters and gatherers or anyone who is selling the same items over and over.  The batch post feature will remember your settings and post all marked items with a single click.

To use this feature, select an item in the Appraiser tab and set the stack size, pricing model and other options. Now select the Enable Batch Posting option. Do this for all items that you want to batch post. Now, shift+alt+ctrl click on the Batch Post button to post all the items that you marked. Next time you visit the AH, shift+alt+ctrl click the Batch Post button again to post any of those items again using the same settings. You can also alt click the Batch Post button to refresh the pricing of all marked items or shift click to list the exact prices that marked items will be listed at.

In the last chapter, we talked a little bit about undercutting. As well as enabling or disabling undercutting for an item, you can also configure how price matching is performed. It’s important to refine the price matching model that you are using if you want to make gold in WoW. If you price match items that are priced outrageously low, then you are going to be charging stupidly low prices yourself and eventually push the price down for the item, which is bad for you if you sell a lot of that item. (Tip: Buy the outrageously low priced items and resell them instead!). To avoid this, the price matching module only undercuts the market price by a certain percentage. By default this is 20% but you can change it.

Auctioneer Undercut Options

Click the Configure button at the top right of the Auctioneer frame then expand Match Modules on the left side and select Undercut.

The top slider allows you to change the maximum undercut percentage of market value. You can also set the undercut amount as a percentage. By default it will undercut the lowest price by 1% (as long as the maximum percentage below market is not exceeded). You can increase this if you want but there really isn’t much reason to.

You can also set the undercut to a fixed coin value, i.e always undercut the lowest price by 5 silvers etc. If you do this, you will probably make more money on expensive items but you will lose money on cheaper items. On the whole, I think the percentage is the best way to go.

The last feature of Appraiser we are going to look at is the ability to hide items in your inventory list if you don’t ever want to post them. This helps avoid accidentally auctioning items that you really don’t want to sell. Believe me, once you get Auctioneer set up the way you like, its really easy to get click happy and sell items you didn’t mean to. Just select the item and click Hide this item.

If you want to see them again, select the Show Hidden option above the inventory list.

You can also click Show Auctions to show items that you have already posted in the inventory list again.

If you want to learn more about Auction House gold making strategies, Mayley Winters has launched a complete video series that shows you how to master the Auction House. Check out my review here.

Auctioneer Update 5.4Posted by xenith on April 28th, 2009

Auctioneer has been updated to 5.4 and is fully compatible with patch 3.1 so go grab it! There have been quite a few changes and this looks like the first step in a user interface overhaul for Auctioneer. This is good news. Sometimes Auctioneers interface is a little intimidating so I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with it. Its great to see the fantastic level of commitment their team shows to this project. I can only image the time involved. If you are feeling generous and use the addon a lot, you should think about donating some cash to help with development costs. Just click the little Paypal icon at the top right of their home page. Thanks to the Auctioneer team!

Auctioneer Tutorial – Using AppraiserPosted by xenith on April 9th, 2009

Ok, so now we are getting into the advanced stuff that you can do with Auctioneer to make gold in WoW. At this point, it is important that you collect at least 3 days worth of scans and preferably 5 or 6.  Perform a full scan at least once per day. The results you get out of Auctioneer are only as good as the data that goes in. You will need to use the full Auctioneer Suite for all the remaining chapters of this book.

Fast scanning with Get All

The latest version of Auctioneer Suite includes a ‘Get All’ function (I can’t confirm if this is in the cut-down version of the add-on. I suspect that it is). This takes advantage of a new ability that Blizzard recently gave to add-on developers that lets them grab all the Auctioneer data in one quick operation. Great news right? Well yes, for those of us who can use it. There are limitations and you will need a very good connection and a pretty decent PC to use it. From the Auctioneer Addon wiki:

• You can only do one GetAll scan per 15 minutes, unless you logout and back in. This shouldn’t be much an issue, since why would you want to do two complete rescans so quickly?
• GetAll may cause you to disconnect. This appears to be an issue on Blizzard’s side which we cannot do much about. We have, at best, anecdotal suggestions about how you can minimize the chances of this happening: have a reasonably recent computer and CPU; do not try to scan when the server itself is behaving sluggishly, or when you have high latency ping times; do not attempt when there are lots of people using the AH; do not attempt when a lot of people are physically nearby. Basically, try using GetAll at off hours and at the less populated Ha’s if you have trouble getting disconnected while using GetAll. e.g. Silver Moon City for Horde and Exodar or Darnassus for Alliance
• GetAll will not have seller info for most auctions. This is caused by a Blizzard limitation in how quickly we can request seller names for auctions. We have adjusted our code so that most of our auctioneering functionality is not affected, but this will affect any seller filters you have in place (as you won’t be able to filter them out if we don’t know who the seller is when the scan is processing). If you want to get seller information, your only option is to use the regular, page by page scan (possibly in conjunction with a GetAll scan).
• When using GetAll, we no longer have to worry about items slipping between pages while scanning, so any items missing from the GetAll scan are immediately removed from the snapshot (as opposed to needing to be missing from two successive scans, as we require during regular scans).

I have used ‘GetAll’ with great success. It really is incredibly fast so give it a try. If you are lacking a little power in the CPU dept, follow the FAQ advice and scan at a low traffic time like early morning.  This is a fantastic new feature that will let you make gold in WoW even faster!

Appraiser

So, now you have auction data to work with, lets look at Appraiser. To get to it, click the Appraiser tab at the bottom of the Auction House window.

Auctioneer Appraiser

The left hand pane lists your inventory. Click on an item to work on posting it. At the top right of the Appraiser pane, you see information about the auction. Stack Size and Number allow you to set how many you want to sell at a time and how many total stacks you want to sell in this auction. In this example you can see we have chosen to separate our two Felsteel Stabilizers into two single item auctions instead of posting them in a stack of 2. Below the stack settings is the Auction Duration setting. Take a look at chapter 2 of this book for some discussion of stack sizes and auction duration settings.

At the top right is where we decide how much gold we are going to charge for the item. You can see the Bid and Buyout costs that will be used if we post the item now. You can manually edit these values if you need to. Above that is the Pricing Model menu. This is the most important part of the Appraiser tab when it comes to making fast gold. These options are not available in the Simple Auction Post tab but they are the key to making gold in WoW at the auction house, especially if you are a crafter or gatherer selling your own products.

The Pricing Model determines how the automatic pricing will be set.

Auctioneer Pricing Models

Simple: This is an  arithmetic mean (average) of prices seen over 3, 7 and 14 day intervals. This is more accurate over a longer period

StdDev: This calculates the standard deviation of the prices, then takes the arithmetic mean of all prices within 1.5 standard deviations of the simple mean; this may discard some extreme values.

Purchased: attempts to see auctions that were bought-out before expiration, and averages those buyouts

Market: An average of the results of the models listed above.

Vendor: Sets the price at 3* the amount you would get if you sold the item to an NPC vendor.

I primarily use Market and Vendor. Market gains accuracy as you collect data. At 3-5 days worth of scans you should be getting reasonably accurate results. I use this model for everything except equipment drops that don’t show up very often and don’t have much (or any) data. For these I use Vendor. You can change the Vendor markup from 300% in the Configuration screen, but I find the default works pretty well.

You can always check the data listed for item in the bottom half of the screen to see if the prices the Market model is giving you seem accurate. You always have the option to undercut by checking the Enable Price Matching box. This will attempt to undercut using the price matching model that you have set in the Configuration screen (or you can use the default). Configuring price matching is discussed in the next chapter.

When you are ready to post the item, click the Post Item button at the bottom right of the window.

If you want to learn more about Auction House gold making strategies, Mayley Winters has launched a complete video series that shows you how to master the Auction House. Check out my review here.

Auctioneer Tutorial – Posting Items Using the Simple Auction Post TabPosted by xenith on March 30th, 2009

In this second part of my tutorial on how to make gold in WoW using Auctioneer, I’m gong to show you one really simple way to use the addon to make gold.

For a lot of players, SimpleAuction contains all the functions that you need. You will get the improved Browse tab and the simple Post tab which allows you to search for items and post items easily. You will not get the more advanced Appraiser window for posting, nor will you get the SearchUI or BeanCounter. These last two are primarily useful to people who are intending to use the auctioneer method (buy items at a low price and immediately resell for profit) covered later in this e-book.

The simple interface is a great, easy way to make gold in WoW without spending too long figuring out the add-on.

If you only want to sell items that you gather, loot or craft, SimpleAuction may well be enough. In this case, you can download the simpified version of the add-on from the Auctioneer Addon site downloads page. Click the icon for the current Release version at the top then select the download in the Auctioneer section (not AuctioneerSuite - this is the full version). Make sure to delete or disable the full version if you already installed it.

Now head on over to an Auction House and interact with the Auction House NPC to display the interface. The add-on makes some useful modifications to the default Browse window. This will still be the default screen that you see when you visit the Auction House. You can always click the Browse tab to come back here.

Auctioneer Browse Tab and Compact UI

Auctioneer Browse Tab and CompactUI

If you installed the Auctioneer simple package instead of Auctioneer Suite, you may not see all the tabs and buttons shown in the image.

The main changes to notice are those in the list of items (provided by the CompactUI module in Auctioneer):

• the stack size and minimum level in separate columns
• a checkbox at the bottom of the list that allows you to display price per item instead of total price. This is very useful for making price comparisons.
• a color-coded percentage of market value (if you have the add-on configured to show this).
  This is a great feature if you want to make gold in WoW because it will help make sure you never pay too much for an item. You will need AuctioneerSuite for this to work since simple Auctioneer doesn’t provide statistics to calculate market value.

Now, click on the Post tab. This tab provides a simple way to post items on the Auction House for the best possible price. You will need to have performed at least one good scan before using it and the more recent the scan was done, the more relevant the price it recommends for your items will be. So if you haven’t already, go ahead and scan now by clicking the Play button at the top of the window.

Auctioneer Simple Post

To auction an item, drag the item (or stack) to the box at the top left (currently ‘Borean Man O’War’ in this screenshot). Directly below the item name, you will see what is being auctioned and for how much using the current settings. When you are happy with this, click Create Auction to post the items.

In the left hand bar, you can see settings for this auction in more detail. You can also edit anything that you are not happy with. If you like, you can change the bid and buy out prices for your item. But generally you will want to use the suggested price.

You can also edit how your items are stacked. In the screenshot above, you can see they are auctioning one stack of 10. But you could changes this to 2 x 5 and auction two separate stacks of 5 items, price adjusted accordingly.  One good gold secret of World of Warcraft is to only list items in full stacks if players always want to buy full stacks.  Some stackable items sell better if posted singly, so experiment with different stack sizes for your items.

You can also set the duration of the auction. I always set mine to 48 hrs personally (because I am lazy and don’t want to relist often). The downside to this is that your deposit will be higher. But you only lose the deposit if you do not sell the item at all.

The important options are at the bottom.  If you already have this item listed on the Auction House, you can select the  ‘Match my current’ option to list extra items of the same type at the same price.

Select ‘Undercut competition‘ to automatically undercut other sellers by a percentage (the exact percentage is configurable in the options. I find the default works well enough).  You should usually use this option, but look out for sellers with ridiculously low prices and don’t bother undercutting them. Particularly for trade and faction items that sell in large amounts, the cheap stuff will sell quickly then people will start buying your modestly priced items and you will make more money than if you had undercut the stupid cheap ones.

Finally, you can select ‘Remember fixed price’ to use this price for all future auctions of this item (until you change the option or manually edit the price). Most of the time, you won’t use this. You are usually better to set prices in line with the current market.

If you want to update the list of auctions of this item, click the Refresh button.

When everything is to your liking, click Create Auction. Often, this is all you will need to do to list an item, so you can get everything on the Auction House very quickly. What better way to make fast gold that with single-click price optimized auction listings?

If you want to learn more about Auction House gold making strategies, Mayley Winters has launched a complete video series that shows you how to master the Auction House. Check out my review here.