Manipulating AH prices to your advantage

[gensmeta]

Everyone knows auctioneer, right? Most people use it.
And most people who use auctioneer do a refresh on the item they want to sell, to adjust to market prices, before posting the auction.

Let's take advantage of that.

For this example I will use embersilk cloth, since it was suitable on my server. Basically you need an item that stacks, and that has high supply and demand on AH.
Start with obtaining (buying/farming.. whatever. doesn't matter how) about 5 stacks.
Then, post the goods piece by piece (ie not a stack of 20 cloth per auction, only 1) for a ridiculously low price. (unfortunately you need to fill buyout as well, which is why we need 5 stacks). Post about 30 of these 1-piece auctions. Then go do something else for a while. If/when the auctions are bought, wait 30 minutes and then post 30 more the same way.

Personally, I only had to wait like 18 hours before AH was totally flooded with embersilk cloth at about 40% cost compared with when I started.

Next step, of course, is to buy all this dirt cheap cloth and start to sell them of at normal market price.
Voilá! Profit.


EDIT: This is probably old news to some of you, but the method still works, and I haven't seen it mentioned in these forums.

EDIT #2: Didn't see the stickied auction house tips thread. Will post there, so could a mod delete this thread, please?

[NooWaay]

Seems a nice idea thanks, might have to use this for Infinite Dust. 70-100g on my server.

[monkieassasin]

Ive been doing this for some time, and i call this "fishing", or "trolling" (the real definition from the dictionary) for prices. What you do is you just simply post 1 stack really cheap, or even less, you can do just 1 cloth, and ppl will still undercut it by a ton, and buy them out. I do this when im wanting to lvl additional professions but dont want to spend alot of the mats for it. Comes in real handy. +rep for being the first one to post it that i know of

[Grabberman]

ive done this alot and it works great (despite my gold purse seems to have a giant hole in the bottom) the best part of this is those pople that think "i wanna sell this lets put it in for 5g less" and it ruins the market then you can resell later

[lechatelier]

This method makes use of the fact that your average buyer is too lazy to buy out single items while your average seller will always try to beat the lowest price. I have actually seen that work on some of the less populated servers as well but you can forget about utilizing this method on high-population realms ... at least on somewhat desirable items. There are tons of people around - not only me - with set up Auctionator buying lists just waiting for fools to sell items under their average price. Your 100x1 stacks of Embersilk Cloth will be gone in a matter of seconds.

So, yeah, I would not put my money on this if I was playing on a somewhat popular realm - at least not with desirable items. Great observation anyways!

[benrusso11]

Everyone knows auctioneer, right? Most people use it.
And most people who use auctioneer do a refresh on the item they want to sell, to adjust to market prices, before posting the auction.

Let's take advantage of that.

For this example I will use embersilk cloth, since it was suitable on my server. Basically you need an item that stacks, and that has high supply and demand on AH.
Start with obtaining (buying/farming.. whatever. doesn't matter how) about 5 stacks.
Then, post the goods piece by piece (ie not a stack of 20 cloth per auction, only 1) for a ridiculously low price. (unfortunately you need to fill buyout as well, which is why we need 5 stacks). Post about 30 of these 1-piece auctions. Then go do something else for a while. If/when the auctions are bought, wait 30 minutes and then post 30 more the same way.

Personally, I only had to wait like 18 hours before AH was totally flooded with embersilk cloth at about 40% cost compared with when I started.

Next step, of course, is to buy all this dirt cheap cloth and start to sell them of at normal market price.
Voilá! Profit.


EDIT: This is probably old news to some of you, but the method still works, and I haven't seen it mentioned in these forums.

EDIT #2: Didn't see the stickied auction house tips thread. Will post there, so could a mod delete this thread, please?

all my auctions got bought out in 10 minutes no one got the chance to under cut me

[pitagora]

Don't really see how this would work. If it's a high demand item at 40% then all your inventory would be bought immediately by AH players. I do this every day and can tell you there is a competition for underpriced items. Some ppl do ca complete scan every half an hour all day long.

[mitchymo]

This method makes use of the fact that your average buyer is too lazy to buy out single items while your average seller will always try to beat the lowest price. I have actually seen that work on some of the less populated servers as well but you can forget about utilizing this method on high-population realms ... at least on somewhat desirable items. There are tons of people around - not only me - with set up Auctionator buying lists just waiting for fools to sell items under their average price. Your 100x1 stacks of Embersilk Cloth will be gone in a matter of seconds.

So, yeah, I would not put my money on this if I was playing on a somewhat popular realm - at least not with desirable items. Great observation anyways!

If you're patient, this method can still work. You undercut by about 20% and post 100+ single stacks. The effort/AH cut makes it less likely that any buyers are going to buy you out. Repeat this step for a few days until the price has been driven down around 50% of original, and then buyout the entire AH/repost at markup.