There is a new site in the World of Warcraft scene which allows you to gather statistics on the auction house outside of WoW. Similar to what WoW Econ provides but it’s free! (WoW Econ charges for their service)
The site is over at www.wowoah.com (WoW Online AH) and there are some pretty neat features that I use to help earn more gold.
Find Out Your Servers Top Sellers
You can now see who the top sellers are on your server (calculated by the sum of all their auctions over a period of 7, 14, 30, 60 or 90 days)
The benefits of this is you can see what the top sellers on your server are selling to get so much gold and you can move into their markets. The one downside I foresaw was that I could become a top seller by just posting 100 infinite dust at 200,000g each and skew the numbers, but this is resolved by the “Seller Rating” score (the stars on the right). The Seller Rating compares that sellers items prices to the average of all other items by other sellers to see if it is around the same average, the closer it is to average, the higher the seller rating.
Investigate Your Competitors
Another great use for this tool is to see what markets your competitors are involved in. Type in the sellers name and it will show all the auctions that they have posted in the last x amount of days. This is great if you are new to a profession and notice that someone else is selling the same items as you, search their name and see what other items they are crafting and putting on the AH to discover new markets you can enter and ways to make gold you didn’t realize.
One aggressive tactic I use against some competitors (hey it is AH PvP right?) is to find out all the markets they are competiting in and enter those markets and undercut their auctions. It will teach me how they derive their profits and I may learn new ways to move inventory using my professions.
Item Trends
Every server goes through cycles (due to peak time, weekends, holidays) but sometimes these are hard to predict or spot. New markets can open up if a player was dominating that specific item for a while and ended up leaving, causing the prices to rise, for example:
Faces of Doom is an off-hand created by the inscription profession. After entering the glyph market I noticed I had a lot of snowfall inks and just sold them on the AH for 15g each, then I discovered one of my competitors was selling faces of doom, which uses snowfall inks. The crafting cost (at 15g per snowfall ink) is around 75g, so when I noticed that the price was at around 185g I jumped right into the market and have been selling around 2-3 every evening, giving me an extra 275g profit/day.
You can see the jump in prices, one of the crafters ended up not posting for a few days and his aucitons expired, raising the price to my fallback and now I can sell at 245g each, which is a 170g profit per book! Use this feature to spot other opportunities in your auction house.
While the site is new, they are rolling out some additional features in the coming weeks so check back every so often if you are an analytical nut such as myself. I will post any changes I notice on the site in future articles so be sure to subscribe to the RSS to be notified.
Popularity: 3% [?]
This site has been down for at least a week. Did it fail or otherwise go out of business?
site still offline (2010-03-16)
Still down as of today, 3/25. Damn this would be hugely useful!
still down (20.04.2010)
Still down, May 6th, 2010
still down, June 4th, 2010