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Chapter 1 - The Auction House
Understanding how to properly use the Auction House is very important so I have included an
entire chapter focused on it. In this chapter you will learn about the essential addons to use to
make buying and selling on the Auction House much easier. You will also learn about buying items
and reselling them for a high profit. I will also discuss ways in which you can find your own niche
to make tons of gold.
Finally, in this chapter you will learn about techniques including market manipulation of the prices
of items and about bidding on items and getting them extremely cheap. It is these kinds of
strategies that are discussed in this chapter that will make using and selling items on the Auction
House much easier. You will be able to quickly assess the value of items and make informed
decisions regarding pricing.
Ten Tricks to Dominate the Auction House with Auctionator
When it comes to making money on the Auction House, Auctionator is the best tool you can learn
to use. The only other addon that I use on my level 1 auction characters is MailGet, which
everyone needs to retrieve the items they buy and sell on the Auction House. Let's start by
making sure you have the right version of Auctionator installed properly.
Head to Curse Gaming and find the Auctionator Addon, when I wrote this guide it was at
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/auctionator.aspx. There are two options,
automatic install and manual install. I have used both but I would recommend automatic install. If
you use automatic install, Curse will have you install a program called Curse Client. It will run in
your system tray and allow you to quickly and efficiently update your addons without knowing
how they work.
Otherwise, if you choose to use manual install, you will have to download updated versions
manually when new patches come out. If you choose this option, download and extract the
contents of the zip file from Curse into your World of Warcraft/Interface/Addons directory:
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Once the Auctionator folder is inside your World of Warcraft/Interface/AddOns folder you can load
up World of Warcraft (restart it if it's still running) and it will be installed.
Knowing Prices
The first and most important point I'm including in this section is that knowing prices is THE MOST
IMPORTANT aspect to making gold with Auctionator. Auctionator DOES NOT tell you prices
(although it gives you SOME informational tooltips), only you can figure these out. It takes awhile
to get a feel for each market, and you might make a few mistakes learning it. This is not
something I can teach you. I can't tell you that Frozen Orbs will sell between 60-80g consistently
or that Dream Shards sell above 20g pretty well so if you see them lower buy them. This is only
true for the realms I play on and at the time I wrote this section.
I'm also not going to keep these price estimates updated as time goes by, since they will
inevitably fluctuate. There is also no right answer when you ask what is a Dream Shard worth.
This is dependent on too many variables, what day of the week it is, what time of the day, how
many people are playing, if it's Super Bowl Sunday, etc. Once you get a feel for the prices you'll
realize that prices are dependent not only on the current market but also on the amount of time
you're willing to spend finding a buyer. If you post Dream Shards up for 10g they will sell in
minutes. You can sell a single Dream Shard at 30g and it will probably sell but it will take a week
or more to find a buyer. The skill here is watching the prices, logging on and posting your
inventory at the right time in the right quantities depending on how fast you want to liquidate it.
When Dream Shard demand rises above supply the Auction House will start to get depleted and
prices will rise. If you're paying attention you can post remaining inventory at higher prices and
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they will sell, instead of undercutting the cheapest post.
The Shopping List
The Shopping List is an amazing feature that you've got to be aware of. Every time you do a
search with Auctionator it saves the term in the left side, (which is called Recent Searches) and it
saves the term even if it's a typo :(. Next time, all you have to do is click on the name of the item
on the left and it will automatically search for the item and list the results in the appropriate
format! You don't even need a keyboard to make hundreds of gold in a sitting with Auctionator.
'Recent Searches' gets pretty packed, pretty quick. It keeps the most recently and most popularly
searched items at the top so the typos and less often search items sink down. It's even more
effective to keep Shopping Lists of your favorite items. This way when you login you can load up
your Shopping Lists to remember the hot items you have been tracking, you won't forget to look
at Dream Shards or Small Dream Shards because they'll be right there. And best of all, you won't
need a keyboard :).
Here is what it looks like, I created a fake test list to protect the innocent.
Buy Buy Buy
The buy feature in Auctionator is amazing. It will search, sort and organize all the auctions for a
specific item. The best part is that it even shows how many items are in each price range. For
instance it will say: 3 stacks of 20 or, for example, 20 stacks of 1; this tells you a lot.
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After you click on the Buy tab, all you have to do is either type in the search term or click on one
of the items on the left bar. The left bar is automatically populated with recent searches or
manually populated with items if you're viewing a shopping list. Play around with the interface to
get a feel for how it works.
The coolest thing is that it makes it so easy to buy a ton of auctions. All you have to do is click on
the row with the price that you want to pay and click buy in the bottom right. It will then prompt
you asking how many of the stacks you want to purchase. This is how I start out most of my
auction sessions. I use my recent searches on the left (or shopping lists) to search for my favorite
items. When I see the right prices I'll buy them out and post them higher.
Sell Sell Sell
The Sell tab is the most useful part of Auctionator. Instead of selling things individually, calculating
and entering the values for each item, you can rapidly sell dozens of an item in a matter of
seconds. Once you have the Sell tab selected, you just drag the item from your inventory into the
Auction Item box in the top left. You can see here I put up my 149 Relic(s) of Ulduar. Auctionator
will automatically load the list of matching items in the right column and let you select which
position you want to sell them at.
I had a friend who didn't know he could select the price on the right side, he thought that
Auctionator always undercut the lowest price. I showed him how to do this and he was extremely
pleased. In the screen shot below I will probably post the Relics above the 2g 11s or maybe above
the Relics for 2g 0s. Either way, all I have to do is select the price that I want to undercut and it
will calculate the new individual and total prices.
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Once you have the price highlighted you can select the duration of your auction. Always keep
track of what the deposit is, if this goes too high you might need to lower your price to ensure
that the auction will sell before the time expires. Finally, click either Create Auction, which, if
possible, will sell everything in 1 stack or select Create Multiple Auctions and it will bring up this
dialog:
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This dialog lets you post auctions in the stack size that you want. For Dream Shards I would
mostly do 5-10 stacks of 1, in this case I will do a 1 stack of 100 Relic(s) of Ulduar since this stack
size sells very good.
Big Stack Small Stack
A lot of people post large stacks of high volume items at low prices so that they will sell quickly. It
almost seems like they do this so people like me can pickup the stack, split it up and repost it for
a profit. Who else is going to buy, for example, 20 Frozen Orbs for 50g each? All 3 tabs in
Auctionator are really good ways to hunt down big stacks. You can even do this from the default
search screen, but I don't recommend EVER using that (unless Auctionator starts saying there are
no auctions and if that happens then logout or switch auction NPCs. Here's what a really good big
stack looks like for Dream Shards:
This guy posted 80 Dream Shards at 17g each. I had already bought 1 stack and sold 12 of them
for 24.55 and after this screenshot I bought the rest. These have been consistently selling for
22-30g on my realm, so I'm very confident that I will be able to sell them. So for a 1360g
investment I can immediately start posting these up at the positions I want, and I don't have to
wait for prices to adjust to make my profit. I'll probably sell these over the next several days for a
total of, AT LEAST, 1800g for a nice ~440g profit.
It's good to keep stack size in mind when posting or buying. Imagine a scenario where you want
to post 5 Dream Shards and the cheapest price listed is 17g. You need to look at that 17g listing
and see how big the stack is. If it says 1 stack of 20, or 2 stacks of 20, you don't need to go that
low with your price. Most people who buy things like Dream Shards don't buy stacks of Dream
Shards they buy individuals. They will search for the cheapest individually priced Dream Shard
and buy that one. The above image is a good example of this. I'll post 5-10 Dream Shards at 24g
24s right after I buy them for 17g each.
However, THIS IS NOT TRUE FOR ALL ITEMS; particularly I've noticed that Relic(s) of Ulduar sell
better in large stacks (of course so does cloth, ore, bars, herbs, etc). This is probably because
people want to buy large even numbers for turn ins. I've been buying ALL RELICS for <1g 50s and
I've never had a problem selling them for as much as 2g 80s (stack of 200). Usually they are
posted really cheap in small stacks and sell much higher in large stacks divisible by 50. I build a
stack of 200 when I can, post it between 2g-3g per and it usually sells the first time I post it. This
is a huge money maker.
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Splitting and Combining Cosmic Essences
Watching Cosmic Essences is fun. At the time I write this Greater Cosmic Essences (Greaters) sell
from 11-18g consistently. Lessers sell for 3-8g each. Do the math and you'll see these match up
pretty well. But the fun part is that they don't always match up, in fact they actually hardly match
up in my experience. In the last week alone I've seen Lessers selling for 3g each and Greaters
selling for 15g, that's a 6g profit. It's not a ton but it's a really good thing to throw into the mix.
This works both ways, you can find Greaters for sale for 12g buy them and split them and 20
minutes later sell them for 5g 50s each (I did this today!). Why would anyone buy a Greater
Essence for 15g when there's a stack of Lessers for sale for 3g each? Who knows these things?
Closing Spreads
I call it a spread when items get listed with a large range of prices as a result of several poorly
planned undercuts. Here's a hypothetical example of what I mean. Let's say you search for Dream
Shards and see (5x1 means 5 stacks of 1):
10x1@24g
5x1@23g
12x1@22g <--- SPREAD TOP
1x1@21g
1x5@20g
1x1@19g
3x1@18g <--- SPREAD BOTTOM
What we see here is that the 1x5 stack isn't an individual stack so most buyers aren't going to
buy this stack. So now we see the spread a little different, 3 items are blocking the price at 18g, 1
is sitting at 19g, the one at 20g isn't going to sell to most buyers and there is only 1 at 21g. What
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you can do here is buy the 5 individual Dream Shards at 18g, 19g and 20g and repost them either
at 21g 90s or competitively somewhere higher on the stack. This might seem obscure or unlikely,
maybe it seems obvious to you (that's good) my point is that sometimes items are priced lower
than they seem. In this example the 18g Shards are a steal, ESPECIALLY considering the range
that Dream Shards usually sell.
You really have to look at stack sizes and the quantity of items that are selling at the prices to
determine how much you can afford or risk to move to higher prices. Just last night I saw Abyssal
Crystals in a similar setup, however the price differences were in 5g segments so it was a much
better deal. I was able to buyout all the individual Abyssal Crystals below 100g and repost them
all and sell them all that night. I believe my total investment there was about 400g and I resold
them for just a little less than 500g. If I hadn't bought out the low posted Crystals the perceived
value of the Crystals would have stayed well below 100 gold and I wouldn't have been able to sell
the others that high.
Here's a real example, notice where the REAL value of Shards is:
Watching Your Existing Auctions
After you've posted everything and spent 20-30 minutes shopping, buying, selling and making
numerous trips from the mailbox and back you've got to remember to check your More tab. This
will give you a recap of what you're doing. It will even show you if you're still holding the cheapest
position with all the items you have posted (green check mark) or if you have been undercut (red
X). Most of the time if you've been undercut it's not the end of the world, prices will adjust and
your item will have its time. Notice how many Dream Shards I have up right now, I took this
picture in the evening when everyone was posting so prices were dropping quickly, they'll come
back up though.
Other times you might need to immediately repost your item and undercut the other guy. Items
like Frozen Orbs, Abyssal Shards and lvl 213 epics might experience price inflation and you might
know that's about as high as they are going to go. To milk that opportunity you need to undercut
by a small amount keeping the price high but keeping the best position so that when a buyer
comes around your item sells.
In times like this (when demand is lower than supply but the prices remain inflated), you want to
keep the best position on the Auction House while prices adjust downward. Just because there are
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more sellers than buyers doesn't mean there aren't buyers who aren't going to wait for prices to
adjust before making a purchase.
There's a button on the bottom you can click to refresh all active auctions or you can select them
individually and they will update.
No Deposit Items
You don't have to be an enchanter to make a ton off enchants. Items like Dream Shards, Small
Dream Shards, Lesser & Greater Cosmic Essences, Abyssal Crystals and even Frozen Orbs (this
isn't an all inclusive list, there are more!) have ABSOLUTELY NO DEPOSIT! That means you can
post them at any price you want for up to 48 hours and not pay anything if they don't sell. You
can even take them down if you want to reposition them. I don't know why Blizzard did this,
maybe to create an economy just around these items, whatever the reason this is the best place
to start for beginners to start playing the WoW market.
Start with a few items at a time, like Dream Shards and Greater Cosmic Essences, start watching
them and learning how their prices move. If you're a risk taker, which you'll need to be in order to
be really successful, buy a stack or a few low priced items and sneak them in at different prices.
This way you can see that it's not only the lowest item that sells (well, it is, but during times of
heavy buying an expensive Dream Shard will EVENTUALLY sell even though it wasn't posted as the
cheapest). Posting your items in the cheapest spot isn't ALWAYS the best strategy, it's mostly for
people who are impatient or have a lot of inventory. With no deposit items, you can play around
without risking a deposit. It's also useful for high volume items you have a ton of and need to get
rid of, just make sure you're making a suitable profit.
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Adjusting Your Undercut
In the Auctionator menu (in the top right) there's an Undercutting menu. You've got to adjust
your undercut. This won't only help you make money but it will help everyone else who is playing
this game. Ever notice how prices step downward. For instance someone posts a Dream Shard at
30g, then someone posts one for 29g 90s, next someone for 28g, next 27g 90s, next 27g 80s,
etc. The people who undercut by exactly 10s are probably using an addon, the people who
undercut by a whole number of gold are both impatient, crazy and not using an addon. Now if
everyone used an addon it would take 10 posters to undercut 1 gold (10 silver per poster). This
isn't bad, but if everyone used an addon that undercut by only 1 silver instead of 10 it would take
100 posters to bring the price down by 1 gold. Of course that's pretty idealistic. Some people
might say that if you don't lower the prices enough people won't buy, that's hogwash. Most people
who need a Dream Shard for an enchant aren't going to shop around for it, they are just going to
pay the cheapest price on the Auction House. When they do this, they get a warm fuzzy feeling
inside because they think they got a great deal.
Here are the undercuts I use. This will instantly increase all of your profits.
If you've enjoyed this small section of Hayden Hawke's Secret Gold Guide and want to receive
more information like this or learn how to make more gold. Please visit me at
http://www.secretgoldguide.com
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