How to Price Your Stuff on the WoW Auction House

Wrath of the Lich King (the new World of Warcraft expansion) and the new continent, Northrend, have brought some interesting changes to the WoW economy. Quests pay at least 4 gold each and there are hundreds of them. Alchemists and Scribes are buying up tons of herbs and crafters are getting their tools into new leathers and ores. Not to mention the new gear, food items, and so on.

So there's a pretty fair quantity of new items for the gold grind and a pretty fair amount of new cash coming into the game. Prices for items will vary from Horde to Alliance and server to server, but people will have gold and you'll be selling stuff to these people.

Do you like to farm or grind for your gold?

Northrend herbs start at 30-40 gold a stack and go up from there. Keep in mind the "old world" herbs, too. Most of the herbs required for Inscription are selling at a very good price, with the exception of the Outland herbs.

Cobalt and Saronite ore look like they're running 40-50 gold a stack and Titanium is just grim right now. Mining is always a good money maker and all the ores sell well, even the "old world" ores.

You are going to be killing a lot of critters on your travels through Northrend, you might as well skin them. You will make plenty of gold by collecting all those skins, even if the prices drop.

Hungry? With all the new cooking achievements, and food buffs, in the game food items that you gather (Mammoth meat, Shoveltusk flank, etc.) will sell. So will recipes, though some of the new ones are "bind on pickup."

Back to the Auction House

So what price do you pick when you post your items on the Auction House? You will need to study your particular server to answer that, but it's not hard to find out. I use the Auctioneer Advanced addon, which isn't essential, but it is very nice to have.

Auctioneer will give you some good info on market prices, but you can also observe prices yourself. If you come in high, say market is 30 gold and you price at 100, then your stuff just won't sell. Come in much lower and you are cheating yourself out of some serious gold.

People fellow certain patterns when they by stuff and you should keep this in mind. Scribes will frequently by a dozen stacks, or more, of herbs at one time. Leatherworkers and blacksmiths will buy up piles of skins and ores. In either case they want to make a bunch of something or powerlevel their skill. So they buy a ton of stuff and work their skills.

Since they are buying a lot at any one time you don't need to undercut everyone's price when posting your stuff. Look for the prices of the full stacks of stuff and then prices your stuff 10 to 20% above the lowest of the other stacks. They will still sell. Experiment with a few at a higher price and see if those sell.

Only post a few stacks of your inventory at one time. Store the surplus. The reason is that if you post 20 stacks of something and someone undercuts your price with a lot of their own stuff you are locked out, unless you want to manually cancel each auction and repost it.

Post enough of you inventory, at any one time, that you can make money, but not so much that it gets locked up when someone undersells your stuff.

It's funny sometimes... You see a game where one person posts his items and then he and three or four others will alternately undercut each other by pennies. Then someone comes along and dumps a pile of that item, undercutting everyone by 60%. Then one of two things happens: his stuff gets bought out by another seller (maybe me, for resale) or the price creep game starts again at the new, lower, price.

Buy it out? If someone posts a bunch of stuff at a way low price, and you are confident that item sells well at a higher price, buy out the low priced stuff and post it at the higher price. Store some if it's a lot of stuff.

Store that Stuff With Massive Bank Space?

Make a private guild, just for your banker/mule. Start it up like any other guild, then kick everyone out when it's ready to go. It is also probably a good idea if you let them know your plans (to kick them out) ahead of time. Bribery (2-5 gold per signature) will get sign-ups a lot faster.

Once done you have access to that nice, large, guild bank. Sometimes people will even sell their guilds and you can avoid the full of the charter process.

Now that you have the space to store stuff and you have an idea of how to price things, it's time to go make some gold!