Selling gathered items

After spending a lot of time picking herbs, skinning beasts, mining ore, etc you head to the closest merchant to make some money. All that time and work it worth….what?!? 50s. There has to be a better way! There is. List these items for sale at the Auction House. Your first trip can be very very intimidating. However auctioneer can make this very easy for you.

1. Click on Post items
2. Drag the item to the item box in the top left (you can alt-click on the item in your bag if it is a single item or you only want to list one of a bunch of an item)
3. Review the auctioneer suggested bid and buyout options
4. Click on List item
5. See. That was easy

Selling crafted items

Many use auctioneer to identify opportunities to buy materials needed to craft an item much cheaper than the crafted item’s projected sale price. This can happen with any item however it is most likely with items of limited supply because of level restriction or difficulty in getting the recipe. An example of this would be 14 and 16 slot bags. Everyone needs more bag space which gives us the high demand we want. Only tailors can make these bags which give us the lower supply we want. If you could buy the materials for 1G, craft the bag, and then sell the bag for 2G, you have identified your first auction house crafting plan.

Selling destructed items

Using Enchantrix add-on, available as part of the Auctioneer Complete download, you will see additional information when putting your cursor over an item. You will be shown the likelihood that an item will disenchant into a specific enchanting material, what the projected sale value of each item is, and the overall projected disenchant value would be.  Similar to the crafting items strategy above, this tactic just involved finding items which you can use your skill to change the purchase into something that will generate a profit.

Buying/Selling

After I finish an auction house scan, the very next step I do is to click on the search tab and search the available listing for bargains. I find this tactic to require the least effort. Auctioneer gives me the projected profit right there on the screen and all I have to do is buy, get it from my mailbox, and relist it. The only settings that I change on the search tab are:

1. Bids/Buyouts. I tend to search buyouts first as I want to quickly identify and then buy items. After I have identifies all the buyout I want to complete, I switch to Bids. I will limit them to medium or less time frame as anything longer is a waste as I will very likely be outbid.
2. Projected profit. I change this as I move up in my pool of money. When I first start out I search for 20s profits. This will result in a very long list of items. Later, I switch to 1G, 2G, 3G, and finally 5G projected profits.

Time Frames: I prefer to list most items for 24 hours just because, well, I am lazy and I don’t want to be tied to the auction house all day.  The main items that I will list for 8 hours are items which have high listing fees relative to the project profits. These items I will usually list for 8 hours and during peak weekend or holiday periods only.

Cornering the Market

So you want to be the next Carnegie or Bill Gates? With this risk come great reward and great disaster.  Buy purchasing all items in a category; you control the supply and therefore the price. I have never tried this tactic so I will say very little on it.  My only advice would be to do it with less than 20% of your money and to find something that is a very low supply item (middle to high level potions or enchanting supplies come to mind).

Tips/Tricks

Intro

Note these tips/tricks are just what I have learned on my specific servers and will not apply to all servers nor are these all the ways to make money.

Days

Weekends have a much higher level or both supply and demand. After longer periods of play, people have more gathered items or loot to sell. People will have money from these sales as well as gold from quests and loot to also buy new items. Weekends seem to also be the time for more organized raids which always drive up the value of items like potions. I look to make 70% of my weekly money on weekends. Don’t ignore weekdays but make sure to adjust your strategy. 

The one day that I usually avoid for selling is Tuesday given the usual WoW system updates which will limit the number of people on-line which dries up demand significantly. Inversely, I always look to buy Tuesdays as you can find some great bargains when so few people on online bidding/buying.  This is especially true after an extended maintenance.

Good Items

-All recipes especially blue recipes are great items given their very very low listing fees. I would say that easily 50% of my items for sale at any time are recipes. Be careful with very high end recipes as the demand will be lower and it will likely take much longer to sell.

-Twink items are any item that twinks (characters more interested in top line items than cost) covet and are fantastic items to sell. I just look for them when buying. Others actually go a farm these items for sale. Your choice.

-Enchanting materials are great given their constant limited supply. These materials can only be made by enchanters disenchanting items. These enchanters will then use these materials to enchant other items and level up leaving only their extras to sell. Talk about limited supply!

-Quest items such as Deadly Blunderbuss or Strong Troll’s blood are great sellers and people need them to complete a quest and may not have the ability to craft them or don’t want to spend the time finding someone that can.

-Faction specific items or items that are deep in faction territory can be great sellers to people of the opposite faction. Be careful here giving the high listing fees and high commissions when using neutral auction houses.

-Make sure to search WoW update notes for information on item changes. Invariably, an update will make some items worth much more than before and some items worth much less than before. Take advantage of that.

Bad Items

-Items that have a high MSV to projected sell price are to be avoided. In plain English, listing fees will eat you alive on these items.

-Very high supply items such as lower end cloths, ores, herbs, leathers, etc are mostly useless as you will always have new listing undercutting your listing by 1s. Why bother?

-Any item with less than 25 sales showing in the data. I just avoid these as there is not enough data to make me feel comfortable in my analysis.

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