WoW Auctioneer - A Virtual Gold Machine

Many World of Warcraft players will tell you that the easiest way to make gold is to gather raw materials and sell them in the auction house. I used to believe that too…before WoW Auctioneer.
Don’t get me wrong, raw material wholesaling isn’t a bad way to make a little gold but mining, skinning, and herb gathering can only take you so far. The amount of gold you can make is limited by how much time you can afford to spend hunting down resources.
If you’re trying to level, do things with your guild, or just relax while you play then you really don’t have the time or will to spend hours a day competing with everyone else for the rare resources that sell well in the auction house.
Enter WoW Auctioneer. Auctioneer is a free user interface add on that tracks items and auctions for WoW. It’s completely legal, well within Blizzard’s terms of service, and is literally a gold minting machine! In a nutshell, Auctioneer does a complete scan of the auction house when you visit and stores bid and buyout prices for every item being auctioned. After an item has been seen enough times at auction, WoW Auctioneer can give you a very accurate average price that the item sells for.
The powerful thing about this is that very few people pay attention to the historical prices for what they put up at auction. They’ll look at how much other players are selling the item for and price it the same, price it a few times vendor rate, or just take a wild guess. They have no idea what the item’s real value is but, with WoW Auctioneer you do! You can tell that some item at auction for 40 silver typically sells for 15 gold, buyout the auction, then put the item right back up at auction and make several gold than a minute’s work!
Another cool feature is that WoW Auctioneer lets you search auctions to get a list of items that have buyouts below their historical average selling price. You can set a minimum profit level (I typically use 1 gold) then hit “Search” and you’ll get a list of items you can buyout immediately and put back up for auction at a higher price. Granted, you’re not guaranteed to get that higher price but if Auctioneer shows 100 historical auctions where an item sold at 6 gold and you can buy it for 40 silver you have a lot of profit potential even if you don’t get the full 6 gold.
Finally, WoW Auctioneer helps you price items you’re going to auction so you don’t end up selling an item for much less than it’s worth. Nothing used to burn me more than auctioning something for a few gold then returning later that day and seeing it up for 20 or 30 gold. Auctioneer provides a tooltip for each item that gives you an auction history for that item and even gives you pricing recommendations based on that data.
All in all, WoW Auctioneer is well worth downloading - but be warned, you may end up spending more time in the auction house wheeling and dealing than you do out in World of Warcraft adventuring!
Downloading, Installing, and Using WoW Auctioneer
First, download WoW Auctioneer. Install both Auctioneer and the Enhanced Tooltip mod. Once you’ve got it installed, head over to the auction house where we’ll get to work. You also might want to change the maximum memory allowed for add ons to something larger than the default 48Mb (do this from the main login screen where you enable/disable mods). WoW Auctioneer usually needs more UI memory than that when scanning the auctions - 128Mb works great for me.
When you open up the auction screen, you’ll notice a couple of changes. First, there’s a new “Scan” button on the auction house “Browse Auctions” tab - pressing “Scan” will tell Auctioneer to scan all of the auctions currently listed on the auction house. Depending on the time of day and how many items are at auction, this could take up to 15 minutes to complete. Before you start trying to buy low and sell high, make sure to do a few more scans at different times of day to give wow auctioneer enough data to work with. Around ten scans should do it then do another 1-2 scans a day to keep track of market changes.
Once you have a good data set, there are a variety of ways to use the information to make gold. The Enhanced Tooltip mod shows a pop-up window for each item in your bags that gives detailed information about any item. Taking a look at this before you put anything up for auction will keep you from underpricing items you’re not familiar with. This can also help you decide what to sell at auction and what to dump at the vendor - if an item that is rarely seen at the auction house and has a relatively low price just dump it. That way you aren’t stuck paying fees to list stuff that never sells (remember, you lose your deposit if your item doesn’t sell).
This information is great and will keep you from underpricing your items, but it’s not what helps you make the real gold at the auction house. The real WoW gold is made in finding items that are severly underpriced and can be purchased and relisted at huge profits.
WoW Auctioneer has a search function that allows you to search all current auctions for items being sold for less than they’re worth. You set the minimum profit you want to make (like I mentioned above, I typically use 1 gold) and you get a complete list of items you can buy out right then and relist to make an average profit of at least 1 gold but often several times that.
That’s it! Using WoW Auctioneer you can literally make hundreds of gold a day just stopping by the auction house a few times during your travels. When I first discovered this strategy, I literally spent several hours each day watching auctions and trading gold and items just like a Wall Street broker. Let me tell you it can get addictive!