by Basil Berntsen

Today we’ll be talking about something that many experienced auctioneers have discovered on their own– the stack size you list on the auction house has an effect on your profits and sales volumes. There are many types of things that you’ll find yourself selling as you get more involved in making gold on the AH, and most of them are being bought by people who need more than one, but less than a stack.

The buyers for whatever product you’re marketing are motivated mostly by price, however also by convenience. If a buyer needs a stack of 3, say, Infinite Dusts, unless you provide them with the choice of buying a stack of three, they need to choose between 3 singles or a stack that would leave them with leftovers. If the prices are the same, they’ll typically go for avoiding leftovers. Many will even pay more for singles to they can avoid leftovers. You also have to factor in that many of them use the default AH interface, complete with its horrible sorting, so they may just buy the singles to avoid having to page through to the stack size they want.
How should you use this to make more gold? You can provide the service of pre-packaging your wares in a variety of stack sizes. The skill comes in when you’re trying to decide what sizes to offer, how much of each size you should list, and what prices you should use. Here are some rules of thumb:
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Due to the fact that Mining is a gathering skill, which feeds other professions materials for recipes (Blacksmithing, Engineering &Jewelcrafting), nearly all gathered material can provide a profit. There are some minerals which have a higher demand than others, therefore providing a speedy and consistent profit. Though, a higher demand often means more competition. Hopefully, this guide will help you determine which minerals to gather and sell based on time restrictions and possible profitability.

Northrend Minerals

All Northrend Minerals can help you profit, though it takes strategic Auction House placement as well as patience to profit this way. You should take advantage of using a 280%+ flying mount when farming in Northrend. If you do not have a flying mount, it is highly recommended that once you start bringing in a profit, you make your first purchase that of Artisan Riding and Cold Weather Flying (will cost you up to 6000g if you have Expert Riding). Having the ability to fly increases your profitability, making all gathering 280% quicker. 

Timing Your Gathering

Farming throughout Northrend will be difficult when done at peak server times, this is when the highest population is active and a higher number of players are collecting minerals. Ideally, you will want to gather herbs during off-peak times: 2am to 2pm server time, during weekdays; weekends are the worst times to farm due to a more active population (weekend players, those not working or at school).

Profitable Product

Titanium Ore - Is Northrend’s most profitable mineral. Highly sought by Jewelcrafters trying to obtain Epic Gems through Prospecting. Also high in demand smelted in to Titanium Bars, Titanium Bars are used to make Titansteel Bars, which are used in all high-end dropped  recipes (Ulduar, Trial of the Crusader).

Saronite Ore - Whether smelted or raw, Saronite is the prime ingredient used for leveling Blacksmithing,Engineering and Jewelcrafting in Wrath of the Lich King. Jewelcrafters require the Ore, which will be prospected for gems. Engineers and Blacksmiths will require the Ore smelted in to Bars.

Cobalt Ore - While the bars are used to craft various Engineering parts, Cobalt is the mineral with the least demand. The one plus side, is that it requires only a single piece of ore to make a bar, instead of two ore like other Northrend minerals. Selling this Ore in its smelted form will fetch the greatest profit.

Auction Placement

Timing is everything when you are trying to make maximum profit. When it comes to raw goods such as ore/bars, you want to make sure you catch people when they are leveing their professions. Most minerals that will be bought are likely to be used for leveling professions, therefore people usually stock up in the evenings during the week and on weekends. Be sure to place your auctions between 2pm and 9pm server time, Tuesday through Friday. It is also a good idea to place them for the minimum duration available (12 hours), so that you can update the pricing if you so happen to gain any competition in that time. Weekends are great times to profit due to the increase in active population, but you will have more competition, so place your auctions with caution. 

Almost always, it is very difficult to gain a maximum profit on Sundays. Weekend players have gathered minerals and placed them by this day, there will be a mass amount of minerals, and many people will be undercutting, avoid placing auctions on Sundays.

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This is aimed at alchemists, but you can always find an alchemist to do it for you. Tipping is always optional

Lets assume these prices:

Eternal Fire = 20g
Huge Citrine = 1g
Dark Jade = 1g

Cost to make Earthsiege diamond = 22g. AH Value = 40-50g (on my server at least). Profit = 18-28g a piece.

Elemental Air = 20g
Chalcedony = 2g
Bloodstone = 2g

Cost to make Skyflare diamond = 24g. AH Value = 30-35g. Profit = 6-11g a piece.

So, what I did was make 10 of each a day (so as to not flood the market) and sell them on the AH. Total profit for 10 of each would be 240-390g.

Now, I’d recommend being a Transmutation Master.
Making a gem I’d often get x2 Earthsiege/skyflare diamonds and sometimes x5. So imagine multiplying your profit by 5 occasionally for every 1 gem you want to make.

Don’t forget transmuting an epic gem every 24hrs either  thats an extra 120-200g.

IF YOU can get a JC to cut them, all the better. Check your servers AH to see which cut prismatic gem gives the highest profit and get them cut. You can double your gold like this.

Its easy money, and if you want you can try posting more at a time, but people might undercut you.

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The item that we shall be profiting today with is:

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=40110#comments

As some of you know this is a rare unobtainable item, previously obtained from the Scourge Invasion Event. Once in your inventory, you get the “something is haunting you” buff + a phantom pet that follows you around. The pet is un-target able but can be cast on, and is called “Scourge Haunt”.

Now you maybe be wondering how we are going to make cash from it?
1) This is no longer obtainable.
2) It gives an awesome effect and can be traded/thrown.
3) Collectors would die for this.
4) It is rare.

The advantage being not every1 is knowledgeable. In order to make the cash – spam trade asking to buy a memento.

After awhile you will get whispers saying “Offer”. Now you need to convince these sellers that its worthless item, that every1 has and isnt at all rare. Hopefully they’ll buy to the bs story and you can offer them 5-500g, or slightly more if needed. Some people may be stupid enough to sell for this price.

Once you have got a steal deal, post it as a sale on your realm forum and emphasis that it really is worth alot. Put it on ah for 5k+ bid meanwhile.

Hopefully collectors and so will read the realm post and begin bids.

Happy Profits!!

PS: Ive bought 3 so far, 1 for 500, 1 for 650, and another for 200g. It took ages convincing and finding sellers, helped the fact im on the most populated server. So far ive got a bidder at 6.5k on 1. My plan is to buildup loads and sell them at a later date and space out each sale.

The Longer you wait to sell, the higher its worth in gold!

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this is a little trick I used to do for a while when I had nothing else to do.

1. Head over to the AH and buy all the “Shadow Crystal” on the AH for 50 silver or less. Even if it is 49s99c or 50s.

2. Make sure you have Gem Perfection. If not,

ALLY go to Valgarde (speak to Ounhulo) or Valiance Keep (speak to Alestros),

HORDE go to Warsong Hold (speak to Geba’li) or Vengeance Landing (speak to Carter Tiffens).

3. Cut you Shadow Crystals into any gem. Theres roughly a 50% chance to get a perfect gem. Now, sell all your gems you cut to a vendor. Normal gems sell for 50s, perfect gems for 1g. Do this in bulk for best results

4. Ask in trade WTB shadow crystal and buy in bulk too. Add regular miners to friends list and have them COD stuff to you.

5. /run SendChatMessage(“WTB “..select(2,GetItemInfo(36926))..” <50s a piece. Accepting all COD’s”, “CHANNEL”, nil, GetChannelName(“Trade – City”))
This will say:
WTB [Shadow Crystal] <50s a piece. Accepting all COD’s
in trade channel. Change the text as you please

6. ???

7. Profit!

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Want to make sick gold? READ ALL OF THIS, I’m not trying to bore you, I’m trying to help. Nothing of what I posted is useless, so please read to the end.
Ok, so you guys have all heard the ever so famous method of making lots of gold with the AH; buy low sell high. But this is useless if you dont know what to buy, when to buy it and when to sell it. Here is how I’ve done it and made 1k profit in 20 minutes (every day) with an extra 800g that didn’t sell yet. You will need the basic auction house addons (auctioneer/auctionator)

Firstly, all servers vary and the demand of items vary. If you want to do it the safe way, monitor the prices for a few days at regular intervals. Key intervals are:

• Morning (6-8am)
• Midday
• Raiding hours (6-8pm server time)
• Late night (10pm-2am)

Here is a list of items that I bought and sold

• Silver ore (sells VERY well)
• Eternal Water
• Eternal Fire
• Small Egg
• Mageweave cloth (sells VERY well. Note this down)
• Iceweb Spider silk
• Netherweave cloth
• Greater planar essence
• Greater cosmic essence
• Handful of copper bolts
• Light leather
• Medium leather
• Heavy leather
• Thick leather
• Rugged leather
• NOT BOREAN LEATHER
• NOT FROSTWEAVE CLOTH

I’ll add the rest when I remember.

Buying low
I can’t take screenshots to demonstrate so I will explain as best I can.
Search for an item (light leather)
Results:
Item——————-Price for each (this is all that you want to be looking at)

2 Stacks of 3—————40s
10 Stacks of 1————–43s
2 Stacks of 20————–49s
1 stack of 2—————–1g99s

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Fluctuation is something that happens every week and is caused by supply and demand; there is a weekly trend in prices and it usually goes unnoticed by the vast majority of players.

However, there are people that exploit this and make insane amounts of gold, and you are going to be one of those people.
The way it works
On the weekend, everyone is off work and a lot more people farm their little socks off. As a result (more people playing), Supply goes up and demand goes up. But the supply goes up more than the demand and this pushes prices down as people desperately undercut to sell their products first.

This is a good thing, because on a Saturday evening you can buy almost anything for about 70% of the normal price. The time supply goes down is around Wednesday & Thursday because the people who farmed over the weekend and whose items did not sell have come back by now & they decide to sell it cheap to make some quick $. Wednesday & Thursday night is the time to sell because they will sell for the most, on average, at this time of the week.

How are you going to use this? You have probably heard of “buy low, sell high” since it is spread like a disease by people trying to sell gold guides that don’t work. Well, you find a nice market, I will use Greater Cosmic Essence as my example (because for me it’s one of the best items out there when it comes to reselling). Here I will outline how to use fluctuation to your advantage.

On Saturday, go to the auction house. There will be a LOT of Greater Cosmic Essence on the auction house. On my server, they sell on saturday for 9-11g each, with some people listing higher. On Wednesday & Thursday I can easily sell these for 15-16g.

You should check these prices on your realm before attempting this. Make sure you make at least 3g per essence when reselling on the Wednesday & Thursday. My strategy is to buy as many essences as I can from 9-11g early Saturday evening (prices on your server may very, the max price you should buy for should be at least 3g under what you can sell it for on the Wednesday/Thursday) then go back about 2 hours later on the Saturday, and buy a load more from 9-11g since people are flooding the auction house with new listings, and so that I never have to go over the 11g mark to buy as many auctions as I want.

By waiting for new auctions to pop up for the low prices again (undercutting happens like hell in those 2 short hours) I can buy a huge amount without going above my limit. I don’t buy anymore after that because even though there are many more auctions left to buy later on, buying everything is a good way to start inflation. It’s about control. On the Wednesday as soon as I get back from work (5:30ish) I’ll list a good amount of auctions. After around 40 minutes most of them have gone so I put more up, and then again afterwards. Then on Thursday I do the same again.

I sell more on the Thursday, and I do it in chunks so I don’t risk flooding the market, but still sell high amounts of auctions. If you have any left over on the Friday, feel free to try selling them or buy less on saturday and sell the leftovers and new purchases again the next Wednesday/Thursday. If I’m looking at (minus fees and buying price) 4g profit per essence, and sell anywhere from about 300ish on the 2 days in the chunks I talked about that is 1200g in total for maybe 10-15 minutes of work. And that isn’t constant working, either.

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This works in Stormwind(and Booty Bay of course). Since 3.2 the auctioneer and the mailbox are really close together,
but there is a thick wall between them preventing most people to access them from one spot.

The blue circle marks the spot from where you can access them both.

Now there are basically 2 ways to do this.

1. Activate the nameplates above friendly units (see Keybindings)

You can then just rightclick the nameplate. This is pretty easy, but if you want to be able to put a little more automation in the whole AH process
it’s not a good one, because depending on the number of people around, nameplates are jumping around and don’t remain on the same spot.

2. Use macro and the “Interact With Target” Keybinding

Open your keybindings-window and scroll down to the “Targeting Functions” category. There you will find “Interact With Target”. Set it to a key you
like. I will give you an example what macros you could use.

Macro for targeting the Auctioneer Jaxon(must exist and be alive, else no target):
Code:

/cleartarget/targetexact Auctioneer Jaxon/cleartarget [dead] [noexists]

Macro for closing the AH window:
/run CloseAuctionHouse();

Get all money from mails(mailbox must be open):
/script CheckInbox() for m = GetInboxNumItems(), 1, -1 do TakeInboxMoney( m ) end

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These macros will cancel your auctions if they are undercut. I don’t camp the AH, don’t relist so I don’t use them myself, but if you have the free time for the 1s war, here is a weapon. Again, I advise against 1s wars as camping AH wastes your time.

This macro requires Auctioneer to be installed and a fresh scan.
/run i,k,o=1,1,”owner”;while k do k=GetAuctionItemLink(o,i);if k then _,_,_,_,_,m=AucAdvanced.Modules.Util.SimpleAuction.Private.GetItems(k);n,_,c,_,_,_,_,_,b,d=GetAuctionItemInfo(o,i);if m and d<1>m*c then CancelAuction(i);end;end;i=i+1;end

Another macro just lists auctions, doesn’t cancel:
/run i,k,o=1,1,”owner”;while k do k=GetAuctionItemLink(o,i);if k then _,_,_,_,_,m=AucAdvanced.Modules.Util.SimpleAuction.Private.GetItems(k);n,_,c,_,_,_,_,_,b,d=GetAuctionItemInfo(o,i);if m and d<1>m*c then print(k,b,m);end;end;i=i+1;end

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