A Basic Guide to Auction House Marketing.

[Ryoushi.]

Basic Guide to Auction House Marketing.

I wanted to help out with this little guide, as well as build my way up to Contributor status.

I have searched through other similar threads. Mine is unique, easier to follow, and will be updated.
I will change this and add to it as I find out more about the post-WotLK market.

I use an auction character for this, but that's not important. I just like to use it to keep my gold organised and it stops me wasting too much on my main character. This may be, to you, 'common sense', but some people don't have a clue how to do this, and I wanted to show some future auctioneers how. Don't flame me for it, it is simple but if you're new then it's a great help. Doing this will bring you to great profit, especially if you're not lucky enough to have a high level character yet. For you 70-80's, it may be better to work out your own methods or to just farm. I just wanted to present this.


This guide is mainly all about working with stacks on the auction house. It's easy to follow, so let's begin.

Okay. First, we'll start by looking at Motes. It's best to use Mote of Air because of the higher price.
Mote of Earth & Primal Earth may be better if you don't have much gold to start with.
I just bought a stack of 5 for a total of 1g70, and another 5 for a total of 1g50.
After getting a stack of 10, you can turn the motes into "Primal Air" and usually sell them for a higher price:


Here's a similar example with Greater & Lesser Planar Essence.

We receive 15 Lesser Planar Essence for 69g, which we can then turn into 5 Greater Planar Essence.
So we go from 3x 23g to 5x 19g. That's 95g, meaning we make a profit of 26g!

Believe it or not, things like this actually work. People are making hundreds overnight, just by playing with stacks.

I now did the opposite this time and used Large Brilliant Shards.
This is great to do because the stacks themselves are cheap and you can profit so much. Try it out!
I bought a stack of 20 Large Brilliant Shards for just about 20g, and then split the stack.

Sold them all overnight and made a fair profit, enough to repeat it multiple times!

Dream Dust:

Profit? Yes.


Another thing to try with the Auction House is bidding low on expensive items.
One way to do this is by clicking on the bid price so the lowest bids are first, and then changing the item type to 'Epic'.
I bought a Void Robe recipe the other day for just nine gold, probably by chance, and then sold it the next night for 150g.
People seem to check epics and rares daily, just incase there's a cheap item on there
This method is often done with twink items, because newer users will sell a twink item without checking the price.


Here's a small tip.

If you're stood around with literally nothing to buy for a while, try taking up tailoring.
The 'shirts' of the auction house are visited often, because people like to look good.
If you're on an auctioneer or bank character, you can pick up tailoring and make shirts in the spare time you have.


With 300g and several twink items in my bank, I was impressed with how much I had multiplied my gold in the space of a few days. I had made over 250g profit in a short time. As I said, if you're a new user with around 20g spare, try this out. This can be great if you've got a little time to kill and you're wanting that Nightblade or Spotted Frostsaber. ;-) I then sent some of what I had made to my main character, and repeated the process. Constantly making more and more, and being able to do it with even more expensive items.


I moved on to Mithril Bars after that. I bought stacks of 20 for around 20g, then sold them in pairs of two for 3g50 per.
Again, another great profit. This can also be done with things like Thorium and Adamantite.
You may want to do this with ores on your server, some people do. Ores can be better than bars in some cases.


Lichbloom:

A more expensive choice, but with larger profit than other Trade Goods.
These may not sell just yet, but prices may rise in the future as they seem important.

Icethorn:

Icethorns have been selling fairly fast, but they can be expensive to some.

What we can do next with herb items is see what they'd sell best as.
If we search them up on Wowhead or another database, we can see which potions use them.

From this, we can see that it may be best to sell Icethorns in 2's, maybe the odd 5.


Other Good Materials.
There are other Trade Goods you can use. I've made a basic list of what you could use, remember to check prices on both 20x and 1x.
(I'm not sure about any of the WotLK items yet, I'm still dealing with BC items. I will have to wait until the WotLK market is stronger)
Arcane Dust
Large Brilliant Shard's
Mote of Air/earth/fire/life/water
Primal Air/earth/fire/life/water
Void Crystal
Nexus Crystal
Righteous Orb
Large Prismatic Shard
Dream Dust
Thorium ore/bar
Mithril ore/bar
Adamantite ore/bar
Parrot Cages
Throat Piercer's
Orb of Deception
Savory Deviate Delight
(You can also sell the recipe higher on neutral AH, on some realms)




Tips:
If you have an auction character, do NOT waste money on accessories such as Christmas outfits or Lovely Dresses.
Be sure that you're making profit. Even if you're only getting 5-10g, profit is profit. Try it out. Overtake the Trade Goods.
Some people find that buying items during the day (higher traffic) then selling at night is better. This is how it works on my server, too.
This will work with most Trade Goods, not just the ones I said. Try herbs, try leather, try cloth.
Watch the trade channel. People may sometimes want to sell an item quickly, so they might announce it there.
Don't run around when you're waiting for auctions to sell, there is always more to do.
Never agree with prices you do not want to. People will try to haggle you on higher-priced items, do not get sucked in.
Remember not to sell items super-cheap just because you want to sell them fast. This is how we make profit, by buying the cheap items.
If you have a tailor as a main, try buying the recipe for the Haliscan clothes, creating them, and then selling them higher than you bought.
Trust me, Haliscan items sell well. People don't bother looking where they come from, and people love to splash out on fancy-looking clothes.

Igor's Mass Auction is almost necessary. For stack-splitting, it will save your clicking-finger a lot of work.
It has been updated for WotLK. Make sure you tick 'Load out of date addons' on the AddOns Menu.

Using this addon, you can click the items to put them up instead of dragging, set all prices easily, and auction masses at once.
Download
VirusTotal


There are other addons you could use, but I used to use them and I think I'm better off without. Just too much hassle.
If you do want an extra hand with auctioneering, and perhaps a lot of extra profit if you use it wisely, try "Auctioneer".
It'll tell you the market prices of things on your server, so you can buy cheap and sell high. View it here.


Anyway. I hope you enjoyed my short guide, and hopefully you'll be making a fair amount of money for yourself. As long as you put the effort in and try as many sales as possible, you'll make a great profit without even having to do any work. This won't require much time or effort, but be sure you log in every few days to keep control of the auction house as well as watch the sale prices. You may want to write some of this down on a short list, that way you can look back at it and repeat it each time you log on.



More from me another time. :-)
-Ryoushi

[Knomez]

+rep for: honesty bout saying you wanted to contribute and wanted to get to contrib( you didnt blatantly say I WANTZ REPZORZ NAO you) so over all
you get rep for:
- good guide
- honesty
- seeming to know how to abuse the auction house to make money

[Ryoushi.]

Thankyou Astra! :-)
Yeah. I'm not a greedy person at all, I'd just prefer to be further recognised for helping out.

I've been using Auction Characters for a while, but the market totally changed in TBC. I'm now adjusting to WotLK and working out the best way to sell each stack of trade goods. Herbs will be a good place to start, if you sell them in the amount that popular potions use (e.g. 3x)

[tsincaat]

Looking forward to seeing you update it for wotlk :] +Rep

[Mancer]

Looks like a good guide, Perhaps you should try it with Primal Life?

[lagingtoo]

kinda obvious but good for people that need it

[xennon]

Nice that you have made a list of goods +rep

[Ryoushi.]

Thankyou for the comments :-)
Had a fair amount of views already, that's good.

Logging on now to see if there's any more I can screenshot.

[reytheist]

You called it a basic guide, and it is just that. But definitely useful for people that really have no idea where to get started. +rep

[Ryoushi.]

Thankyou.

Arguably, when this gets longer it wouldn't be 'basic', but I'll keep the title because it's basic in the way that it's so easy to follow and easy to do. I've already figured out a few of the WotLK items, just waiting for alchemists to catch up. :3

[dotOrion]

+rep when I can again - well explained guide.

[battletoads]

Question: On the Primal Air you have up there, aren't you actually LOSING money?

5 motes for 1.7 each, 5 motes for 1.5 each = 10 for 16 gold. You sold the primal for 15 gold and 79 silver.

That is, unless, of course, you are talking about a stack of 5 for 1.7/1.5 gold total.

[Ryoushi.]

I meant a stack of 5 for 1g50 total. Sorry, I wasn't too clear on that.

[da_bizkit]

+rep for: honesty bout saying you wanted to contribute and wanted to get to contrib( you didnt blatantly say I WANTZ REPZORZ NAO you) so over all
you get rep for:
- good guide
- honesty
- seeming to know how to abuse the auction house to make money

QFT +3rep from me too =)

[Ryoushi.]

Thanks Bizkit. :3
Much appreciated.

Updated with Planar Essence, a personal favourite.