From Norganna's AddOns

Auctioneer for New World of Warcraft Players

Written by Arcana.

I find that a lot of the guides here are geared toward players who have high-level characters that might be familiar with a lot of specialized gear. This made Auctioneer a little difficult for me to get a hang of, and I lost about 10 G that I borrowed from another player when I first installed it.

Much of the advice given here is "Know your market". However, I think I would like to write something that's geared for the person who's just bought the game and is experiencing smelting bronze for the first time, or for the elf preparing for his first-ever run through the Deadmines, or for the Tauren woman learning about the majestic Barrens with her newly-tamed cougar running at her side.

Pricing your Gathered Goods

A lot of people use Auctioneer for buying and reselling. However, if you're a fresh new player, you can install Auctioneer and use it for selling, as well. It helps price your goods so you can post what you gather for a good price, without the hassle of calculating prices on your own. Here's a step-by-step guide to selling trade goods on the AH, aimed for a new player.

Choose a Gathering Profession

When you hit Level 5, choose a gathering profession. These are one of Mining, Skinning, or Herbalism, and to a limited extent, Enchanting. If you want more money, you can choose two, but I find that it's less fun than choosing an appropriate crafting skill to go with your gathering skill.

At this stage, I'd recommend that you choose a profession that you want to do, instead of what makes you the most money. Every gathering profession gives you the opportunity to get rich. However, if you want to get rich quickly, I recommend mining.

Gather

Go out and gather a lot of stuff. It might be light leather, linen cloth, copper ore, rough stone, strange dust, whatever. Gather a few stacks of it.

• Copper ore and rough stone are acquired from mining veins and are common in newbie regions. If you're Alliance, Dun Morogh and Elwynn Forest are loaded with copper ore. As Horde, explore Durotar and Tirisfal Glades, as well as the mountains of Mulgore for copper ore. Don't forget to buy a mining pick!
• Humanoids drop linen cloth abundantly.
• Herbs, such as peacebloom and silverleaf, are available in rich quantities in the newbie areas. You may also be able to find earthroot and mageroyal, both of which sell for more than peacebloom and silverleaf.
• You can skin beasts and some humanoids (such as worgen) for light leather at lower levels. You will also often end up with ruined scraps, but these rarely sell in the auction house. Use them to make light leather if you have leatherworking.
• If you're an enchanter, you can disenchant green weapons and armour to obtain strange dust and magic essence.

Posting Auctions with Auctioneer

Go to Auctioneer and do a scan. The scan button is at the bottom of your auction house interface. The process will take 10--15 minutes, and you cannot move away from the auctioneer at this point in time. It is best to take a break at this point.

Click on the "Post Auction" tab and drag a stack of whatever you want to sell into the Item Slot. Auctioneer will suggest a starting price and a buyout price. You can also change the number of stacks you wish to post (which makes selling large amounts very easy).

Now, there's one section that people that I show Auctioneer get confused about, and that's the text right beneath "Price Based On: Auctioneer Price" bar.

There is either:

• No Competition. This means that you're the ONLY person selling this item on the Auction House right now.
• Undercutting by n%. This means that there's competition, but your price is going to be cheaper than your competition by n%.
• Competition above market. This means that your competition is selling their goods for way above the estimated market price calculated by Auctioneer. Good for you -- this means that your price is probably the best one.
• Competition below market. This means that your competition is selling their goods for way below the estimated market price calculate by Auctioneer. Bad for you as a gatherer. Good for you as a reseller.

If the text shows anything OTHER than "Competition below market", then I suggest that you post your herbs, skins, or ore for whatever the price Auctioneer suggests.

The reason that Auctioneer is great is that it saves YOU time while giving you a good return on your labour. You're going to sell your goods because your prices are low, but it saves time because you no longer need to calculate what a good price for your trade goods are. You can also post multiple stacks with one trip to the Auction House. The only thing you need to do is a scan every session before you post your goods, which will take about 10-15 minutes.

(A note. Many people suggest that you scan with Auctioneer for about a week before trusting its prices. This is true, but only when you're buying. I've found that if you want to sell items with quick turnaround time, such as trade goods, then you can safely scan the market and post your goods immediately after. This is because Auctioneer takes a snapshot and sets your selling price based only on the competition on the AH at the time of your scan.)

Wait For Sales

Now, you need to wait for people to see your auction and buy it. Go do some quests, or logout. Wait a day or so. You'll soon enough notice that your auctions have most likely sold.

So why is this? This is because when you did your scan and posted, your trade goods were the cheapest of anyone's on the market at that moment, meaning that yours are going to sell first. As long as you keep posting items on the AH, you'll be bringing in money, which is very important if you're just starting the game and have barely enough money to train.

Just remember to scan the Trade Goods before you sell your herbs, ore, skins, or enchanting materials.

And that's the most basic way that you can make Auctioneer work for you.

Later, I'm sure that you'll develop a few variations of this strategy, like learning not to post too much when prices are low, stocking your materials in the bank and posting them only when the price is high, and so forth, but this is the most basic way to make lots of money.

Becoming a Reseller

I'd cover this, but many other people have covered it in the other Documentation sections. Take a look! They're really good.

The only thing I recommend is that you gather a few gold pieces before you start. You can start reselling with as little as 5G, but make sure that is money you don't need at the moment.

Miscellaneous Tips

Here are a few common mistakes I've found when using Auctioneer.

• Don't buy anything until you know the market. This might require you to do a week's worth of Auctioneer scanning, as well as a lot of investigation of what people end up buying and selling, as well as actually playing the game and listening to people you group with. The more you play and the more you pay attention to equipment that you want, as well as the more professions you get (with alts), then the more you will learn the general WoW market, as well as a few specifics.

• Since all characters of the same faction on the same server share AH data, create a level 1 alt and run it to the local AH. Configure the auctioneer to exit after a scan using the "/auctioneer finish exit" slash command. Each night before quiting (or in the morning before work/school) log in using your alt and scan the AH. Goto bed/work/school knowing you have up-to-date AH information when you return. For morning scans take it a step further and create a batch file that launches WoW and then calls shutdown (XP only). Now when the scan is complete, your machine will turn itself off.

• Some general tips to go along with your new-found AH data:
  • Turn on the trade channel. Pay attention to what enchants people are asking for, and see if you can get the materials for those. Also see what people are looking to buy.
  • Watch how prices fluctuate especially on the weekend. Note that Auctioneer doesn't give you any data of cyclical trends, so you have to observe these yourself. What I've noticed most obviously is that trade goods spike during the week, and drop during the weekend.
  • Watch the Transactions page carefully before posting anything you buy from the AH to make sure you're actually getting a good return. Many things happen in an hour in WoW and it's easy to get less of a deal than you think.
  • Trade goods, especially basic goods gathered by gathering skills have an extremely fast turnaround time. They're great if you need cash in 24 hours or less, but not nearly as good for making the big big bucks. Think of trade goods as your local bonds.

• If you can't sell something, don't just keep posting it again and again on the AH. Try the trade channel. Wait for a weekend before selling. Lower the price. Remember, if you buy something for 3G and can't resell it for 6G, then try selling it for 5 or 4. In the worst case, you'll sell it for a loss, but instead of losing 3G, you'll only lose 1G. If you're desperate, I find that going on Trade and threatening to Vendor something usually gets you a response (as long as you're willing to actually accept a price around the vendor's price). I bought a recipe for 5G, couldn't sell it for two weeks, probably most an additional 1 G in deposits. Instead of keeping it as money sink, I threatened to vendor it for 1G and eventually got 2G for it. Sure, I lost 4G, but that's not a big deal when you made 60G in the past week.

• When you're selling items, generally, the order that people go is Trade Goods, then Recipes, then Weapons and Armour. The last one is where the real money is at, but it's also the toughest to figure out. If you are not willing to take risky investments and buying out 10-25G items, then it's best to keep doing recipes and trade goods until you have enough money.