Selling Common Items on the Auction House

Posted by Markco at 8:00 AM

A beginner’s guide, By Leo.

Is your mailbox full of expired auction items? You can craft gems, enchants or glyphs, but not many people seem to be buying them? How can you post your auctions efficiently, so that you will actually make sales? This isn’t exact science, but I can tell you what I learned.

First of all, always post auctions for the minimum time. That is 12 hours. Wouldn’t this give a shorter time to sell the item? Yes, but I will show you how to undercut, so this will just make it cheaper to cancel auctions, every time you pay the deposit fee.

The only time you should post items for 48 hours, is if the supply is low, or you can’t be bothered to check up on your auctions all the time. This is usually true for most pre-level 85 items, you know, all those greens, whites, meats and cloths you pick up whilst leveling. 

If you sell gems, scrolls, glyphs, ores, bars, enchanting mats, herbs, volatiles or cloths, than you will be competing with farmers and other people that produce these as a routine. These are high supply, but also high demand items. And these are the items I am writing about. I want to show you how to increase your sales on these.

Why do they expire? For a good reason: You are being undercut.

Most items, you simply don’t sell because someone else posted them as well, seconds or minutes after you posted yours. This can be because everyone is playing and posting at similar times. But this can also be because some people sit on the auction house all the time, to get their prices a bit lower than others. This is called auction house camping, and is exactly what you will need to do to sell more of your items.  But don’t worry, you don’t need a sleeping bag, just doing this 4-5 times a night will dramatically increase your sales.

Start selling:

You need two addons to do this efficiently: auctionator and postal. You can do without as well, but this will make it so much quicker. Secondly, make sure what your cost price is. You can find yourself competing against someone doing exactly the same, and find yourselves spiraling down the prices, something neither of you benefit from.

You craft your items, post them for 12 hours.

Check after 5-10 minutes to see what was undercut and cancel them (use auctionator).

Get these cancelled items from your mailbox, and re-post them.

Also craft more of the items you did sell.

Continue doing this all the time.

You will find yourself selling many more items now, making more profit than ever before.

To undercut with the Auctionator addon:

1. Click on the More Tab.

2. Click on the “Check for Undercuts” button, this will search through your auctions and detect whether or not you have been undercut.

3. If undercuts are found it will ask you to cancel your auctions that have been undercut, click Yes. Auctionator will cancel all auctions immediately.

How much should you post, and in what stacks?

Volatiles: sell stacks of 5 / 10 / 15 / 30.

Ores / bars / herbs: sell stacks of 20.

Cloth & dusts: stacks of 5 / 10 /20.

Post some singles as well, since some people come without addons, and tend to buy these first.

Glyphs, scrolls of enchant, gems: sell stacks of 1. Post  1-2 at the time only.

Shards: singles only.

Tips: 

1.       Sometimes it pays off to sell items at ‘off peak’ times. So instead of coming on at 20:00 and posting, try posting your stuff at 17:00 or 22:30 for a change.

2.       Some items sell better on certain days of the week, and some mats are cheaper in the weekends.

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