I am proud to introduce Part 1 of a massive series of articles related to understanding and playing the auction house for profit coming to WoWConfidential.
Through this series, while learning more about the auction house and auctioneer addon, you will also gain a higher level of understanding as to how the whole market and economy of World of Warcraft operates which will allow you to make better decisions when it comes to every day transactions and deciding the best things to focus your time on for the maximum gold gain.
This is one of my best income earners, I learned a lot of this information from Luke’s Guide and it helped me to develop my gold making strategy, he goes into a lot more detail of other ways to make gold not covered here.
Part 1 will cover the basics of how to start off with auctioneer and taking advantage of its core features.
Continue reading to learn how to utilize this strong tool
Download and Install
If you do not yet have auctioneer, you can always download the latest version at: http://auctioneeraddon.com/dl/
You will see a huge list of different things you can download, but to start off I suggest you download the complete package and then you can disable any of the extras that you don’t care about down the road.
Starting Off With Auctioneer
Data Mining
You use auctioneer to scan data in the auction house which goes through every item and page in the AH to build a database of price points and information.
Your first priority should be to scan the auction house as soon as possible. Since the scan processes takes 15 minutes on average to do, these are my favourite times to scan the auction house:
- Right before I go to bed, and you can set auctioneer to close down WoW after the scan is complete
- When I get home from work and want to check my e-mails, websites I frequent, do the dishes etc, scan while doing these chores for maximum time management … lol
Scanning should be done as much as possible to give a consistent reliable average; one time a day would suffice.
Understanding the Data
After you’ve collected enough data points, auctioneer provides you with a heap of information that may overwhelm the first time user.
To enable this data to be shown, you must enable all the tooltips in the “Configure” panel
Great, now all this data will be shown when you put your mouse over any item that your auctioneer has seen in any of the scans that you’ve done and you should have something that looks like this:
I will give a brief description of the important information here, to read a comprehensive article on this information that explains all the data go to Auctioneer’s Wiki page.
Appraiser – Price auctioneer thinks you should list this price for based on weighted averages that it has seen and has seen sell. It also will take into account any price modifications you set to either undercut the current lowest price on the auction house or many other options you have adjusted that I will go futher into in another article.
Simple Prices – Shows trend average prices so you can see if an item is getting higher or lower in demand/price. In this case we can see that the average is going down over a long period of time which indicated that the “new” price is more likely going to be 120g from 230g.
StdDev – Without going into too much math, this stat takes the last 100 prices it has seen and then shows you how much “consistency” the price has. If an item was put up for 50g, then another was put up for 1,000g, and another for 10g, that would be a HUGE stdDev which is bad and it would have a low “confidence” level. This is one of the major stats I look at when deciding whether or not to buy an item to buy and resell. I will discuss my buying/selling strategy later in this series.
Purchased Prices – Another gem of information. This shows you what prices auctioneer has seen this sell for. How it does this is if an item “expired” before it should of then it assumes that it was bought and then puts that price into the purchased prices stat. This can be a little dangerous because auctioneer doesn’t know the difference between an item that is canceled or purchased, but canceled auctions happen rarely, but watch out for the few who try to squew everyone’s auctioneer data by purposely posting a low value item for a high amount and just cancelling it to raise its value. I’ll talk about things to watch out for to do with scammers in a future post.
Last won – You can see that I bought this item for 75g. It is a good stat to look at when you are about to post it so you can see how low you are willing to price to get a good return on investment.
Summary
Follow these steps to build up a great database of reliable information. This is where auctioneer now becomes a mighty tool in the hands of a knowledgeable user to grab up under-priced items, always sell items at a fair market price, and to be able to analyze different sectors of the Auction House to figure out current trends in the market place.
Remember to check out Luke’s Guide. It will definitely give you an upper hand on learning more about how to make gold and the WoW economy.
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Be on the look out for the next part of this series in the coming weeks which will go into the plethora of uses for auctioneer and how I utilize it to make a profit. Click Here to sign up to the RSS feed to know exactly when the article is posted!
Read Auctioneer Guide Part 2 Here!
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IMHO, you need to tell the readers that auctioneer may need to scan at least 3-4 days of data in order for it to be anywhere good in giving a out a fairly good estimate..
I am definitely overwhelmed by the data and since the release of the new autioneer after the release WOTLK, I do not bother to install auctioneer anymore. (that explains why I only have 1k atm..) With the current volatile market, do you think it is safe to trust auctioneer still?
Not many people have the time to scan the AH 3-4 times a day. While more scans/day is ideal and would provide more accurate data, you can still get reliable data from 1 scan a day over a period of a week. After 2 weeks your data will be solid.
Auctioneer is very trustworthy, it is a tool. The market place is in a very unstable condition right now I agree, as ALL the prices are constantly going down since everything was super inflated at the release of WOTLK.
The numbers across the whole market will continue coming down by 20-50% every week, I talk a lot about this in the WoW: Economics post and also I will be putting up a Market Watch post when I notice prices beginning to level out.
Thanks for your comment. It is true more scans/day provides more concrete data faster if you have the time.
Thanks for the guide. I’m looking forward to the rest of it.
Nice guide, has about everything a newbie needs to get started. I’d like to add a bit about the volatile state of the market at this very moment.
I’ve pulled some wicked sales over the weekend by just looking out for people simply not knowing what an item is worth. Do scans 2, maybe 3 times a day. Then just search all armor and weapons rarity blue and upwards and look out for anything that can be a sweet deal. I used to use bottomscanner for this but I’ve read it’s been taken out due to Blizz not really liking the functionality.
Someone posting a nice looking blue for 40g or less isn’t that uncommon. Find a couple of those, don’t be afraid to take a risk now and then and you can easily sell it for 4 times what you payed for it.
There are several advantages and disadvantages to the state of the market at the moment, but if you’re willing to take a chance here and there, it’s the perfect time to find those sweet deals.
Learn to recognize those items that sell better in smaller stacks and instead of putting up 1 big stack, split it up, jack up the price and post an entire batch. People’d be surprised as to how many players choose to pay more (and I do mean a lot more) for just the right amount of reagents, because they just “don’t need a full stack”. It may be a bit of a dirty tactic for making money but I’ve always said to myself “my stuff is selling, this means someone out there is willing to pay the price”. The fact it’s only a game helps to ease my concience too btw.
Quick tip, apparently a lot of people still haven’t figured out that eternals can be split into the crystallized elements. Look up what a stack of ten Crystallized buggers costs, look up the price for one eternal of the same type. Do the math and profit basically.
That’s about it, I’m looking forward to the next article. Cudoz to the author and good luck in game.
I’ve been overwhelmed with the new Auctioneer since wrath. Thank you so much for making a guide step by step showing how to use it. I’ve been reading everything I can about the new auctioneer but i’m struggling.
Very much appreciated.
The new appraiser is amazing. Here is a quick and dirty tutorial, and it assumes that you have already been scanning for a few days, and regularly post 50 or more items a session:
1. load up your bank alt with all your goods
2. Click the appraiser tab in Auctioneer
3. Click configure
4. On the left, look for ‘Match Modules’
5. Click on ‘Undercut’
6. Set it to 1c (might piss people off, but max profit) or .1-.5% (better, imo)
7. close the configuration window
8. Alt click ‘refresh’ to refresh your entire bag. (this will take 30-60s normally)
9. Check the ‘Undercut’ box
10. Set pricing to ‘Market’ (if you prefer another pricing method, than this guide is way too basic for you
)
11. click an item on the left column, glance to make sure that there isn’t an underpriced item already listed (if there is, buy it, and click refresh again).
12. Click post
13. Go to step 11 until your bag is empty.
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This is the method I use to keep approx 650ish gems/pots/raw mats on the AH at all times, and I make about 600g a day for about 5-10 minutes of crafting (JC/Alch) and 30 minutes of posting. If I farmed my mats instead of buying them off the AH, I’d probably be up to 1.5k/day; but farming sucks
nice guide