The Auction Houses in World of Warcraft can be a very lucrative place to make gold. I’ve traded a lot of different items, and made a killing multiple times on several of my characters. What I’ve seen is that few people really optimize their auction house strategy. Here are some of the common mistakes wow players make at the auction house:
- Selling too cheaply. Underpricing may not be the most common mistake, but it’s a devastating one nonetheless. For example, it really shouldn’t be possible to buy a Libram of Resilience for under 5 gold, which I’ve done a couple of times. That item can usually be sold for 50 g or more on most realms. In order to avoid that mistake, you can check the item on wowhead.com to find out how much it’s supposed to be worth currently. This is especially useful for rarely-seen items like some recipes, books, formulas, plans, and blues and purples that you’re not used to seeing auctioned. That way, you’ll know what the item typically sells for so you don’t get taken advantage of.
- Selling too expensively. Who doesn’t want to get every last gold out of an item they are listing? I know I do. The problem is that the deposit is usually quite high for armor and weapons, but also for other items such as runecloth. To be more precise, the deposit for an auction is 60% of the price you would get if you sold it to a vendor. If an item has “no sell price” it will not cost you anything to put it on the Auction House either.Personally, I will often list my blues and purples at “bargain” prices. Basically, I want someone to buy the item if they want it, not wait for it to come down in price because they consider it too expensive. For an item regularly selling at 65 g, I would probably put my buyout for 50 g or less just to get it sold. This also ties into mistake #3 below.Another example is runecloth, as I mentioned above. The deposit on a stack of runecloth is 48 silver, a very hefty sum for something that sells for about 1.60-2.00 g. Now, if you get greedy, you might put some stacks of runecloth at the auction house for 2.20 g. Chances are, they won’t sell. So you relist it for 1.80 g and it sells. Your “real” sell price is actually 1.80-0.48 = 1.32 gold. If you fail to sell it a couple of times then you’ve lost almost all the profits on your runecloth.
- Not using the 80/20 rule. Have you heard of the 80/20 rule? It states that 80% of your results will come from 20% of your efforts, and it holds true across a number of areas, even World of Warcraft.When I first discovered how profitable the aution houses in World of Warcraft could be, I started selling almost any item (white quality or better) I could find. Some would sell well, while others just ended up in my mailbox. I found myself spending a lot of time relisting items that never sold. That’s when I decided to optimize my trading, i.e. focus on the 20% of my effort that brought in 80% of the gold:- Items which had little value at the auction house above the vendor sell price, I started selling to vendors. Things like common recipes and formulas worth 1 g 50 s at the AH and 30 s at a vendor. Also many green items. This was at level 60 of course.
– I lowered my starting bids and buyouts so I would be at the cheap end of the scale to sell things quicker.
– If something was just occasionally in demand, I’d save it in the bank until someone wanted to buy it in the trade channel (I stopped hanging around the trade channel just for the sake of finding buyers for those items. But if I saw someone wanting to buy it, I would sell it then)
– I started using an alt for the purpose of only selling and trading the AH. Doing so saves a lot of time.Doing so gave me more time to grind, quest and raid, which can also be profitable and above all, fun. So keep in mind that 80% of your gold will probably come from 20% of your auctions (the way it is now), and you should focus on that 20% and not (like I did) spend too much time fine-tuning and trying to sell less profitable items.