An overlooked way to make tons of gold in World of Warcraft is to trade on the auction house. When done right, you can earn over 1,000 gold per hour this way, with very little work. When done poorly, on the other hand, you stand to lose so much.
Here are the most common pitfalls and how to avoid them:
1. Sell too cheap. Undervaluation usually occurs in one of two ways. A player may have acquired a rare item but is unaware of its value to other players. Having never seen him before, he or she may think he is bordering on useless and put him on a very cheap list. This is especially true if there are no other such items for sale in the AH.
Big mistake! I’ve made small fortunes stealing bargains like this. It often happens with blue (rare) quality weapons and armor that have a high value to youngsters, sometimes ridiculously high. However, the way to avoid this error is to search for items on database sites like Allakhazam before posting. Simply search for the item there and you will find the average auction house price across all servers. That will give you a good starting point.
The other way to undervalue items is harder to catch and happens to more experienced players. The prices of an item can vary greatly from day to day, week to week, and month to month. From smallest to largest, the variance can be 1000% or more. Unless you need to sell your inventory to raise cash quickly, watch prices for a while, find your high range, and sell when they reach it.
two. Sell too expensive. Some items have a high deposit fee relative to their selling price. An example would be high level green weapons and armor. They might have a deposit fee of three gold coins and a selling price of ten. With auctions like that, if you try to price them too high, you’ll just lose your deposit if no one buys them. It doesn’t take many re-lists to end up with a loss. Or vendor, disenchant or sell those cheap items instead.
3. Not using the 80/20 rule. This is probably the biggest mistake. If you know the 80/20 rule, you know that it states that 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. It’s true in several areas, including World of Warcraft!
Look, to get maximum gold in minimum time, you simply MUST focus on the high gain items and IGNORE the rest. Just because there’s an opportunity doesn’t mean you have to take it. Suppose you are looking for great deals on the AH to buy and relist at a higher price. One item can earn you 50 silver, while another will earn you 10 gold, and changing them takes the same amount of time. At some point you have to decide if the 50 silver item is worth your time or not, or it will just kill your hourly earnings.
Generally, the less gold you have to start with, the less you can be content with earning from each item. But when you have a lot of gold, you NEED to start focusing on the high gain items and ignore the rest, or you’ll never make much gold in the AH.
When I realized this error, I stopped spending so much time on the AH by:
* Sale of items of little value. It takes too long to put them up for sale, often repeatedly. * Sell stuff cheaper, so it didn’t expire as many times * Use an alt to change the AH and do nothing else. Going to the AH with your main wastes a lot of time
Once you do the above, you will have much more time to level up, search, raid, and PvP.