Monopolizing on the AH

No, not THAT Monopoly. Microsoft-esque monopoly.

A monopoly is what it's called when one entity has control over an entire market. In the real world, it's illegal. In World of Warcraft, it's just MEAN. But it's also effective, so who cares!

This is the EMBODIMENT of the buy low/sell high mentality. Except in this case, you buy EVERYTHING (everything in your niche, at least), and sell even higher! This does require some startup gold, but if you've got it and you're bored, have at it.

The basic idea here to control the market. If you do, you can keep supply low, by only allowing the item to appear in small quantities, which will keep demand (and prices!) high.

Beginning the Monopoly - Choosing a Market
First, and most importantly, you need to find a niche or particular item you want to deal with. It has to be in high demand! In my opinion, crafting materials are perfect for doing this. I once cornered the market on Medium Leather. You can choose whatever item(s) you like, but heed this warning! It cannot, CANNOT be an item that is in too much supply! I'll explain why in the next section.

Make People Hate You
Now, get onto the Auction House and find all of the postings of your item of choice. Buy them all. Now, if you know your market (or even if you don't), you can now decide on a new price for this particular item. Was going for 4g per? Set that to 8g per. If anyone undercuts your price, buy it and repost it for a higher one.

Hopefully, you see why you can't choose a highly supplied item. If you do, as soon as you log off and stop buying new ones out, people will underbid you. And until you log back in to buy those out, people will be buying those lower price ones. Also, competition will keep the prices on these items lower than we'd like. For this reason, monopolies tend to work better with higher priced, rarer items, like higher-level crafting materials. And remember: as long as you have the market, you can control supply.

Another GREAT method is to pick a particular blue/purple item, preferably one everyone will need at some point, like Ced's Carver, a level 70 blue dagger. 60% of all level 70 Rogues seem to have Ced's Carver. And since it's a world drop and can't be farmed, that means almost all of them have to buy it. That also means the demand will always be high, and quantity fairly low, which means you can consistently own the market. Make a habit of inspecting people and seeing what they're using. If you see the same item all the time, and also see it at the Auction House all the time, it means lots of people want it and will buy it.

Happy monopolizing!

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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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Buying With Auctioneer

Make sure Auctioneer is loaded, and head to the Auction House!

Short Duration Auction Sharking
Remember, before you buy, you need to scan to make sure you have the most current information.

Talk to the Auctioneer and hit scan. Do not leave the computer! You need to be READY when the scan is finished.

As soon as it is finished, go to the "search auctions" tab. Set the first dropdown to "bid". This will search through the auctions without buyouts available. Leave everything else alone for now, speed is the name of the game.

When the auctions come up, scan through anything labeled as "short" for time left. That means it's under 30 minutes left. It could be 15 seconds, for all you know. Check out the "profit" column. If you see big numbers somewhere, bid on it. Hopefully, no one else will get to it before the auction ends. This is the easiest way to score big profits, because often times people set their bids too low, hoping to encourage a bidding war. If that doesn't happen, you can snag items for far less than they're worth, and resell them! Always do this first, and as soon as the scan is done. Otherwise, you might search for "short" duration auctions and find out there aren't any, because they all ended before you got to them. You can bid on "medium" auctions as well (2-8 hours left), but odds are good you'll be outbid. Still, if you are, you get your money back, so you can do this later. But not now! As soon as you're done trying to shark those short duration auctions, set the first dropdown to "Buyout", and hit search.

Buyout Profiteering
When the results of the buyout search are up, click on the "profit" tab to the right to organize them according to potential profit. Look for big numbers here. If you see something that's obviously being sold under value, snap it up. Use discretion, here! If you mouseover the item and see something like "seen 2 times at auction total", it is NOT a highly bought/sold item. You might not be able to sell it easily. This kind of "feeling out" will come with experience, and eventually you' know if something is worth buying or not. I'll do a post about this at some point, so check back.

After organizing according to profit, do the same for the "pct" tab. PCT is basically how much profit you get for buying at the buyout price and reselling for Auctioneer's suggested price. An item bought with "99 PCT" is essentially 99% profit! Again, use discretion here. Not all items ranking high in PCT will be sure sales. Again, your sense for this will come with time!

BTM Scan
This is a separate addon from Auctioneer, but is now bundled in with it. What it does is scan the Auction House every 20 seconds for the last 50 items posted, and search for a good deal. To activate it, click the "btmscan" tab and hit the yellow triangle (play) at the top of the window. When an item is posted that you can get a deal on, a window will pop up showing the price, the profit, and give you an option if you want to buy it. Again, use your best judgement! You need to have some feel for the economy on the server to spot the real good deals and the ones that aren't really so good.

Bottom Scanner is configurable, but can be somewhat confusing. Go here for more information!

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