The Wow Blog

Little Money Making Tip

by Erik

February 22, 2007 – 9:23 am

I recently got the Auctioneer Addon for WoW, and it sure has made a difference for me! There are so many ways that it helps me, but let me count the ways:

1. The “Bottom Scan” option will scan through the auction listings, and bring up items that you might like to buy. These will be based on three possible methods of profit: a) sell to vendor (yes, people actually enter buyout prices BELOW the vendor purchase price!); resell in auction (it keeps track of recent prices, and determines your likely resell price); and disenchanting (obviously only works if your toon is an enchanter, but you can always buy and mail to an enchanter). It is a little buggy; for instance, if it finds two items for purchase in a row and you buy the first one, the second cannot always be “found” on the same page by the program again. So it has to wait about 5 minutes until it reaches that item again. But it does work! Within mere seconds of launching Bottom Scan for the very first time, it showed me an item that was listed at 1 gold buyout, which vendored for 1 gold 85 silver!

2. The scanning feature keep track of stats from the auction, including a comparison of current prices as compared to the longer historical prices. When you click on an item link in chat, or in the auction or in your inventory, it displays a lot of useful pricing and value information. So if someone messages in the Trade channel that they are selling such-and-such, you can click on it and get a decent idea as to what a re-sell price would be in the auction house, and you can make an offer based on this. The only thing to watch for is that in the chat links, the auction tool will not know how many are in the stack. However, in the Inventory and Auction House it is well aware of the quantity in the stack, and does all the appropriate math for you.

3. When posting something in the auction, it will default the minimum price and the buyout price for you, basing them on a chosen pricing method. That method is 5% below current average by default, but you can also choose to undercut everyone, or try a few other options. I have not changed this yet, but I may in the future. So far, everything I have reposted to the Auction House has sold before it expires, and most have sold for the buyout. I have not done a lot of this yet, as many of the things I have bought for disenchanting are above my level, but my success rate so far is a lot better than my failure rate!

4. It will tell you when something is not worth selling yet, because the prices have dropped. If prices have dropped permanently, it will adjust its base price and let you know to sell again, but more likely prices will come back up and make it worth it to sell later on.

5. When you are in an instance and don’t have time to run to a vendor, you can use the pop-up info to decide what to keep if your inventory is getting full. There is not much worse than finding out the soulbound blue item that you kept vendors for 50 silver, while the “junk” green you dropped sells on at the auction house for 100 gold! It can happen, believe me!

I am sure there are other things that it will do for you that I am forgetting. You can download this tool from the Auctioneer Addon site. As of the data of this posting, they had dowgraded the Gamma to Beta, which simply means that they consider this to be a test release. Almost every addon is in the same boat because of Burning Crusades, as the game interface has changed so radically. But from the amount of time that I have used it, I can tell you that I have found it to be stable, accurate and highly useful.

Hope this helps!