How To Make Gold in WoW Using The Auction House

If you're reading this article, I am assuming you play World of Warcraft (WoW) and are having trouble making a lot of gold, or maybe you just want to make more. Now I have been looking through many articles myself trying to find some decent gold making tips and what I've noticed is that almost every WoW gold article on these sites is very generic at best. They will give you some basic information that you probably already knew and then tell you to purchase some gold guide if you want to make more. I don't know about you, but that doesn't help me at all if I'm just looking for some solid free information. So my purpose in writing this article is to give you that information free of charge. Now don't get me wrong, there are some awesome gold guides out there that really do deliver what they promise. I have tried a few out myself and have been very happy with the results. I will recommend these at the end of this article so that if you are interested in learning even more tips you can visit their sites. But for now, I will get into the free information. I hope you enjoy it and learn a few things to improve on your gold making skills.

This first article will be completely focused on the Auction House (AH) and the gold-making power that comes along with it. I will be making more articles in the next couple days that cover more methods so stay tuned.

When you don't have too much gold, playing the AH is one of the simplest ways to make more. You have to know what to look for though as well as the perfect times to list your items. As far as timing goes, I would recommend never listing your items late at night because there are less people on and that means less of a chance they will sell (There is an exception to this rule which I will explain later). Since you get your deposit back if an item sells, I always go with the 48 hour auction because it will stay up there longer. The reason I say to not list items late at night is because there’s roughly a 10-12 hour period where WoW is not busy. That in essence turns your 48 hour auction into a 36 hour auction since the traffic is not coming through to even see what you have listed.

Now for the strategies. The most basic, but the one a lot of people do wrong, is listing your own items that you have gathered through questing, farming, etc. What you want to do is search for your exact item to see if someone else has it listed. To do this, just type in the full name and hit search. You can also shift + click on your item and it will automatically be typed into the AH search box. If you see that someone else has your item listed, simply undercut them but not by a lot at all. The way the AH is setup, the cheaper the buyout is, the higher on the window it will appear. So even if you undercut someone by 25 silver or less, your item will still be above theirs and people will buy yours over your competitors. If you see that there are many of the same items as yours and they have all been undercut too many times, just hold off and try to sell later. Chances are, the item is already undercut way too low and you don’t want to take that big of a hit when you could just be patient and sell it later.

Let’s say though that you can’t find your exact item. What you would do here is type in part of the name to see if there’s something similar being sold. For example, if you’re selling an Elder Dagger of the Owl but can’t find one, just type in Elder Dagger and see what else comes up and what people want for theirs and undercut them. Now let’s say nothing still comes up. In this case you would search through the categories on the left side of the AH window. Select “Weapons” and then “Daggers”. If your dagger is a level 50 dagger, look at what all the other daggers around level 50 are selling for and list yours slightly cheaper. If there’s no level 50 daggers, look for anything close (48-52). This may sound very simple and basic to a lot of you but you would be surprised how many people don’t do it this way. It’s worth the extra couple minutes to research the item on the AH and get what its worth as opposed to just guessing a price and possibly making a lot less than you would have. Or even worse, listing it too high so nobody buys it and you wasted your deposit. Now you might be saying to just use an add-on like Auctioneer. I used Auctioneer for a long time myself but I found that it’s not always 100% accurate or it won’t find the item I am trying to list. It does have its advantages, don’t get me wrong, but in the end I found myself browsing through the AH anyway to make sure I am getting the most out of what I’m selling.

Another tip is that if you have a rare item (blue), they are often worth a lot more than you might think. If you don’t find anyone else with the same rare item listed as you, just try your luck and put a big buyout on it and see if it sells, you will be surprised. I once sold a level 75 rare item for 125g that I wouldn’t have paid more than 40-50g for myself. I just threw it up there and tried it out and the next day the gold was in my mailbox.

The next strategy, and the one that is a little harder with also a bigger risk, is playing the AH by buying low and selling high. The way I would recommend doing this is by focusing on a single niche at first and then expanding to more niches as you make more gold. This could be anything ranging from cloth, leather, ore/bars, herbs, armor, etc. It doesn’t matter which one you choose as long as you get to know it and know it well. Know the average price that items in your niche sell for, what times of day there are the most items listed as well as the least. All these factors play a role in how successful you will be.

Let’s say your niche is herbs. You notice that on average a stack of Kingsblood sells for 20g. Some days it might be a little more and some days it will be a little less. You also observe that there are always a ton of stacks listed in the afternoon to early evening hours, but in the morning and later at night the supply has dwindled by a significant amount. This is where you would break the rule I mentioned earlier about not listing items late at night. But the reason you break this rule is because in a niche like herbs, there is ALWAYS going to be a buyer as opposed to armor/weapons which people don’t always need because they are easier to get. Now here is what you want to do. You watch the AH until you can snag stacks of Kingsblood for less than 20g. 18-19g does not count because the profit you make will be hardly worth your time. If you are patient you will definitely find someone selling it for maybe 10-15g a stack or less and this is where you buy it all. You then wait until the supply on the AH is low and list your items for our pre-determined average price or even more. There are two ways to do this. If you see there are only 3 stacks of Kingsblood on the AH for 22g a piece, you can just list yours at 21g 50s and I guarantee they will sell.

Or there’s another strategy I use and this is a little more risky, but it pays off. You can go ahead and buy the 3 stacks for 22g and then list ALL your Kingsblood for 25-30g a stack. Again, chances are it will sell but nothing is 100% certain and you risk the chance that someone comes along and undercuts you. Fortunately for you, if you have the gold to play around with which you will after a bit of practice, you can just buy the stacks off the guy that just undercut you and list his Kingsblood for the same price as all yours. You don’t want to do this if he only undercut you by 25-50s or something though because after the AH cut and what not you probably won’t even come out ahead. In this case, just leave your herbs up there and hope someone buys his and also yours since your price is close to his anyways. However, a lot of people will undercut you by a few gold and that would be the perfect time to buy them out and resell.

Another strategy to employ on your niche market would be to find the people that are selling less than a full stack of an item and buy enough so that it equals a full stack and then sell the stack in full. The reason this works is that often when people want to get rid of something but don’t have a full stack they will list it for a lot cheaper than it is really worth. Again I will use Kingsblood as the example with 20g a stack on average as our price. You do a search for Kingsblood and notice someone is selling 15 of them for only 10g, another guy is selling 3 for 2g, and another person is selling 2 for 1g. This comes out to 13g you just paid and you got a full stack. List it for the 20g average price and you just made 7g profit easily. You can also combine this with the previous strategy and completely corner the market on Kingsblood for a brief time and charge what you want. So try these strategies out and see how they work for you. Remember you can choose any niche you want and there’s so many to choose from. Just be creative and you will definitely make a lot of gold.

Another buy low sell high strategy I use on the AH is with rare items (blues). If you read my first strategy you will see how I explained the demand of blue items and how they sell for a lot more than you think they are worth. Since some people don’t know this, you can take advantage of it by buying their items that they have listed for cheap and reselling them higher. Now this does not work for every rare item, so there’s a few things I like to look out for to see if it’s going to be profitable for me or not.

The first one is if it’s a “twink” item or not. Twink items are the ones that are rare and usually around level 17-19, 26-29, and sometimes even 36-39. People spend a lot of gold on these so that they can make their level 19 or 29 character extremely overpowered in the Battlegrounds and kill anyone easily. With careful observation of the AH you can see what items are in high demand by people with twinks.

These days, almost everyone knows the value of these twink items, but on occasion you will find that hidden gem and be able to make a nice profit on it quickly. The way I go about doing my search is by going to the drop-down menu for the quality of the items and selecting “Rare”. Then I will select a category like “Weapons” and hit enter (you can also choose Armor). This will bring up every rare weapon listed on the AH. I like to sort the listings by lowest level first so you can get to all the twink items at the beginning. Then what you want to do is just look through every single blue item that comes up from level 16 to 39 or so. After 39 the rare items can sell for a lot but they are no longer twink items so it’s hard to gauge if you can resell them higher or not. There’s another tip I use in that situation which I will get into in a moment. So let’s say you find a level 28 rare axe with strength, agility, and stamina as the primary stats and the person only listed it for 15g. You can be almost certain that this axe will sell for 50g or more so you want to buy it right away before anyone else does and stick it right back on the AH. Like I mentioned earlier, try your luck here. Put the buyout at 150g or even 200g and see if it sells. The most you can lose is the small deposit if the item doesn’t sell, and then you also know to lower the buyout slightly.

Once you get into the higher level blues, 40+, the strategy is a little different. Here is where the add-on Auctioneer would really come in handy. Auctioneer scans the AH and gives you an average price that it has previously seen all items for as well as other information. It’s really easy to install and simple to use. Just mouse over an item and it will tell you all information about the item such as average price, last price it was sold at, and even recommend a price for you to sell the item for. So if you mouse over a rare item on the AH that is selling for 20g and your Auctioneer says it last saw the item sell for 50g and the average selling price is 45-52g, you know that you have found a profit.

As a simple rule of thumb, if you ever see any rare items selling for 10g or less, it is almost certain that you can sell it for more. Just be sure to check the item out first and make sure it’s something useful. For example a sword with strength and spirit probably won’t have much demand because those two stats do not go together well for any class.

Well those are my main ways of making money using the AH. There are a few other strategies that I did not mention but I will try to cover them in a later guide. For now, stick with these as they are the bread and butter of playing the AH. Some of the information might have seemed simple and basic, but I know a lot of it is often overlooked. I hope you found this guide to be useful and that you learned a few things that you can now employ in your game-play to become successful at the AH and making more gold.

If you are looking to step your gold making skills up even more, there are a few really great gold guides out there that I recommend. I have personally tested them out myself so I know they work as promised. They go into so much more depth than what I was able to cover in this article by giving maps, telling you what to do for each level and zone, what to do with your professions, etc. If you are interested, check out their sites listed below. You definitely won’t be disappointed. Plus, they both come with a money back guarantee so that if for any reason you don’t like the product, you can get a full refund. Both guides I recommend also have a ton of free bonuses they give you if you decide to purchase. These bonuses alone are worth the small price it costs for the guides.

Warcraft Millionaire - This WoW gold guide was written by a guy that has made over 1 million gold in World of Warcraft. I didn’t believe it at first, but if you go to his site there’s a video on there where he shows you how he reached the gold cap of 214,748 gold, 36 silver, 47 copper on multiple characters. I didn’t even know there was a limit to the amount of gold one character can hold but this guy’s done it with a few toons. Go to his site and check out the video, it’s crazy.

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Valkor’s Gold Guide - This is another very solid WoW gold guide that I have used. Valkor explains in great detail how you can make a few hundred gold per hour using a variety of strategies. He also has a lot of bonuses he’s giving out if you decide to purchase including a 60 day WoW game card.

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About the Author:
I have been playing World of Warcraft since it's initial release back in 2004. I have 3 level 80 characters and I'm working on a few more. During my 5 years of playing this game I have found many strategies for leveling and making a lot of gold that really work well. I write these articles to assist people with their game-play so they too can be successful. You can also check out my official WoW guide review site by Clicking Here.