Selling With Auctioneer

The Auction house is a great source of income for World of Warcraft. It's not just for SPENDING money, but also for MAKING money. In short, buy low and sell high.

The easiest way to do this is to get Auctioneer.

Get auctioneer loaded up and head to the nearest Auction House.
Use the "Scan" button to have Auctioneer go through each item, recording price, frequency of posting, vendor info, etc. Do this 3 times a day for a week or so, before you try to buy or sell. Otherwise, you might get a misleading set of data and lose money!

Getting Started
Roll a new character with an inoffensive, fairly vanilla name, and hike it over to the AH of your choice. This going to be your mule, and you will be sending all items gathered on your main to THIS one, so you don't need to run back and forth.

Send some gold to this character. It costs money to post items on the Auction House. Also, buy/make/otherwise acquire some 12 slot bags. You'll need them to hold items, but over 12 slots is just a waste of money -- you probably won't ever have that many items in your inventory!

Next I'm going to go over what you need to know for selling items you already have. I'll go over buying them and re-selling them in another post, as it does require some explanation!

Posting Auctions
Know this first: hold and click an item to have it automatically be priced and ready to sell. That will speed things up a lot!

If Auctioneer is loaded, and you post an auction, the bid and buyout prices are set automatically. This is based on what the competition is selling the item for. Auctioneer will automatically underbid them by 5%, ensuring YOUR item is more appealing to the buyer! You can set the underbidding percent. For example, "/auctioneer pct-underlow 2%" will have it underbid by only 2%.

You may see "cannot match lowest price" in red, when you post an item. If you do, it means that the competition is currently selling that item for LESS than it's worth. If you see this message, don't sell it! Wait for that auction to go away, and sell at the correct price, or you'll be losing money. Alternatively, you can BUY the one that's going to too low, and sell them BOTH at a higher price! Buy low, sell high!

You may see "no competition" in green when you post an item. This means your item is the only one of its kind available on the AH! Auctioneer will automatically raise the price a small amount. You can set it with a command. For example, "/auctioneer pct-nocomp -20%" will make Auctioneer bump the price up by 20%. Since there's no competition, that's fine! Also, it will be handy because when someone DOES undercut you (other people use Auctioneer too!), you've got a buffer of 20% before you start posting the item for less than it's worth.

Think Like an Economist
The economy of WoW is the same as the economy in the real world. The governing principals apply just the same! With that in mind, here are some tips to maximize earnings.

Corner a market. If you can find an item in high demand but low supply, get in on that. Buy out the competitions and resell them at your own higher price. If you're the only one offering them, players have to pay your price to get it. Requires a bit of gold to start with, if you want to keep buying out and reposting items for your higher price.

Obey supply and demand! If you've got an item to sell, and there are 30 other postings for the same item, wait it out. When the supply goes down, demand goes up, and you can charge more!

Consider the item. If you've got a 2-handed sword with defense on it, don't think you'll get much for it. No one needs defense on a 2-handed weapon, because if they're needing defense for tanking, they're definitely be using a shield. Alternatively, if your item is, say, a hat with +intelligence, spell damage, spell hit/crit, understand that people will be willing to pay more for it! Good items go for more money -- try to consider how much YOU'D be willing to pay for it before setting a price.

Always do a scan before each buying/selling session. This will make sure you are using the most recent data, which is essential for letting Auctioneer automatically underbid the competition.

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