Joel Johnson Has Him a Blog

1. The Prep

A. Create an Auction House Mule

An auction house mule is simply another character on your server that you use to do your daily AH work, rather than forcing your main character to travel back to one of the large cities in which Auction Houses are located. She can be of any level. Simply create a new character—preferably with a non-descript name; avoid names like "Auctionlass" or "MulellaDeVille" —and run her to the closest auction house.

You can choose to roll a male character, but on the off chance someone might be enticed to buy your auction item because they think your are female, I suggest going with a feminine name, if not character.

B. Install Auctioneer

The Auctioneer suite of tools is essential for every World of Warcraft player, even if one does not intend to sell items on the auction house. By letting the Auctioneer plug-in scan the auction house for a few minutes a day, you'll quickly gain an accurate view of the going rates for items, essential for both purchasing and selling.

In addition to the basic scanning functionality, the Auctioneer suite also adds two essential tools for the auction house speculator: Bottom Scanner and Bean Counter.

Bottom Scanner is a tool that constantly checks the auction house for items priced below the market average, alerting you of possible deals. It can run while you are performing an Auctioneer scan (which disables your ability to use the other auction house functionality, such as search) or by itself. When Bottom Scanner finds a deal, it pops up a small window with the item's current price as well as the historical average for the item and -- just in case you were unable to do basic subtraction - the potential profit you might make if you were to resell the item at market value. (Bottom Scanner does not adjust for auction house fees, however. We'll discuss those momentarily.)

Bean Counter does one thing, but it does it well: keep track of all the purchases and sales you've made. This is useful to determine if you've made a profit on your sales or if you've taken a bath due to a collapsing market. I stupidly used to keep track of all my auction house sales data in an Excel spreadsheet, despite the fact that Bean Counter was doing the heavy lifting already. You can imagine my frustration when I discovered how much time I'd wasted. (Bean Counter, like all the Auctioneer functionality, is added automatically to the WoW auction house pop-up window after you install the Auctioneer suite add-on.)

C. Seed Money

It takes money to lose money, they say. You'll want at least a few gold in your mule's pocket before you start making sales on the auction house. Use your main character to generate this by completing quests; gathering herbs, ore, or skins; selling loot and other items; or begging a guild mate for a loan.

While it may take about a week to generate the five gold or so you'll want to start working the auction house, that ends up being about right. You'll want to use Auctioneer to do market research for about that amount of time anyway. If this is your first time playing World of Warcraft, you'll need a week to find your footing. If it's not your first time playing, you may already have some money you can send to your mule to get her started.

2. The Cycle

It is possible to make money faster than the way I am about to describe, but this isn't a system designed to make your character rich. Instead, we're trying to prevent long grinding sessions looking for gold when the need arises, most notably at level forty when you are first able to buy a mount. Fortunately, if you're like me, you'll get a kick out of making money with practically no effort.

Here is my daily auction house routine, minus a few unimportant steps:

• Log into my mule character in the morning and open the Auction House screen.
• Start scanning the AH using Auctioneer.
• Activate Bottom Scanner by typing "/btm begin". (There are other ways, but I like to be able to turn it on and off at whim.)
• Sip my coffee, read RSS, and wait for Bottom Scanner to "ding," alerting me to a potentially good deal.
• Let Auctioneer complete its scan.

In the evening, around four or five Eastern time, I log back in to:

• Remove my "won" items from the mailbox, as well as any "green" or better items looted by my main character.
• Scan the AH again with Auctioneer.
• Post auctions using the Auctioneer "Post Auctions" tab while Auctioneer is updating the data.

That's it!

If I'm attentive to the Bottom Scanner dings, I can usually get my morning scanning done in about 15 minutes. Posting auctions takes about the same amount of time or less, depending on how many items I have to list.

3. The Subtlety

If it's so easy, why isn't everybody making tons of cash on the auction house? Maybe they are! The amount of money we're talking about here may seem like a lot, but it isn't all that much compared to the amount of gold generated and spent by players at high-level. But for lowbies a hundred gold a week can be a lot of money.

The essence of working the auction house is that old chestnut, "Buy low, sell high." With thousands of players on each server, there are bound to be good deal, if you know how to spot them. I played World of Warcraft for several months without ever using the auction house, however, and it was obvious once I started trading on the AH that I wasn't the only one who used it only to purchase the occasional item. And with Auctioneer, you don't even have to keep track of the average market value for items. It does it for you.

Of course, to make Auctioneer most useful, you'll need to fill it with enough data to provide a moderately accurate picture of the market. The most simple way is to log in once a day for a week and let it run a scan (without Bottom Scanner on). Because I work from home, I actually scanned three times a day for a week in eight hour increments in an attempt to account for fluctuations in price during peak and off-peak hours.

(I don't believe that Auctioneer and Bottom Scanner factor in time-of-sale data when providing you a historical average price, but we're not talking about real money here, so it's not the end of the world.)

Once you have the historical market data in place, Bottom Scanner will be able to tell you what it expects a product to go for, alerting you when an item is up for sale at a lower-than-average price. What it doesn't tell you is how much demand there might be for that product.

When I first started working the auction house, I made about 20 gold buying and reselling jewels. Then the market seemed to fall out and prices dropped across the board for a couple of weeks. Turns out that jewels, able to be crafted by players, can too easily flood a market. I've avoided jewels since, but it took several weeks to rid myself of all my stock without taking too much of a loss. (If you aren't sure what you paid for an item, add it to the Create Auction tab; Click "RefreshUI" to gather the prices of other same-item sales on the market; click to the last tab in look at Bean Counter's data showing your previous purchases and sales of that item automatically.)

As you buy and sell more on the AH, you'll start getting a feel for what you can turn around quickly and what you can't. If I get a good deal on a product that I've never sold before, I usually do two things: I mouse over the item icon to see how often it's been seen on the auction house before and check Allakhazam to get a general idea of its historical price across all servers, as well as its primary use. If an item has been traded a lot, I can make a guess that I'll be able to turn it around without losing too much money to auction house fees, which can quickly add up on items that must be posted multiple times before they sell.

You'll also quickly learn which items have too high an "auction house tax" to be worth the trouble. Twice I've gotten a good deal on Fel Hide, only to realize that the auction house fees are so high—about a gold for something that sells for five gold on my server—to make it worth the risk. Why I bought the second stack of Fel Hide I don't know.

Or actually, I do know: it was greed. Greed will burn you quickly on the Auction House if you don't practice some self control. It's too easy to buy something with the intention of a quick flip that doesn't end up selling (or won't sell for more than you paid) and want to just take a loss on it to clear out your inventory. That's really dumb. Unless you've absolutely filled every available inventory and bank slot you have, it's better to just hold onto an item until the market changes. You're not losing any money until you sell it, so just be patient.

To mitigate that loss, I try and only purchase items for that have a resale of 200% or better. I figure that doubling my money on purchases gives me a large buffer to post the auction multiple times before I end up losing money on auction house fees. If Bottom Scanner provided the auction house fees in the "Hot Deal" pop-up I might be a bit more aggressive in buying low margin items, but for some reason it doesn't.

I also resell all the green-or-better items and stacks of trade goods my main gets while adventuring in the auction house. Sure, you could do that with your main, but it's easier to keep all the auction house stuff in one place, I find. (And mailboxes are more abundant in the world than auction houses.) Obviously, these have a positive effect on my profits, but I'd say they still have made up less than 100 gold of the 500 or so gold I have made over the last month. And armed with a well-stocked Auctioneer full of previous sales data, you'll know what the proper price to sell your item might be.

(One item I found as a mob drop while questing was a "Double Barreled Shotgun," a blue ranged weapon. The default AH price was like one gold, but I knew from the Auctioneer data that it had sold before for over ten gold. It took two or three auctions to finally sell, but that's a eight or nine gold profit I made just by knowing the history of the market.)

4. The Wrap Up

There are many more ways to make money in the auction house, like buying out whole markets of items to resell or bringing in goods only available from remote vendors, but I'll leave those to others to explain, because I've never tried doing that beyond dabbling here and there. I get a kick out of making money in the auction house—one week, busy with work, I didn't even log into my main at all—but I'm not trying to get rich. Instead, I'm taking a few minutes to scan for good deals and making the most out of the system that Blizzard has provided to make my entire game experience better. You might even say I'm making my game time "richer."

If you try using my tips above and make some money in the game, let me know. Same goes for any simple auction house tips you'd like for me to add.