Hello and Welcome to my little corner on Azzor.com!

First of all, let me introduce myself and then we’ll get on to the real reason you’re reading this article ;)

My name is Tella, I’ve playing WoW for around 4 years now and my main is a Holy/Disc Priest.

My interests include PVE, PVP, long walks on the beach (lol), Achievements and of course, Auctioneering.

I’ve always had an interest in making gold in WoW. I can remember selling swiftness pots on WSG weekend at like level 20 on my first character. Back then 50g was a lot of money! I thought I was rich!

I was never serious about Auctioneering until I was working on the ‘Insane in the Membrane’ achievement. I needed thousands and thousands of gold to pay for all of the Darkmoon Faire decks required to hit exalted with DMF. I started off by selling Flasks on raid nights and then moved into selling Glyphs. Omg did glyphs ever open my eyes to the gold making potential of playing the AH.

Once I completed my Insane achievement, I wanted more. I wanted the Traveler’s Mammoth and I wanted a Chopper. Several thousand glyphs, gold and achievement points later I decided to set a big goal for myself. A goal to hit the World of Warcraft gold cap of 214k. Through Inscription, Jewelcrafting, and other professions I reached my goal in 2 months.

Currently I’m sitting at almost a Million gold :) Anyway, enough about me, let’s get started!

Everyone has to start somewhere, and what better place to start than the beginning? Without further ado – The Basics of Auctioneering:

Bank Alt

First and foremost, you're going to want a bank alt. A bank alt is basically a character that will be parked in a main city 24/7 and used only for AH purposes.

Your bank alt can be any race/class/level combo, but typically they are just low level characters ran to the nearest main city.

For Horde players, I recommend rolling a Tauren bank alt due to the close proximity of the AH and Mailbox in Thunder Bluff; and also since TB is not a highly populated area, you shouldn't be facing lag issues.

For the Alliance, I recommend either a Human or Draenei.

- Stormwind has a very convenient mailbox right outside of the Auction House.

- Exodar is virtually empty other than lots of glowy crystals and NPCs.

I personally have a small army of space goat bank alts, lol.

- My ‘main’ bank alt is an lvl 30 Draenei Mage parked in Ironforge. I use her to sell everything that doesn’t fit on my other specialized alts.
Being a mage with blink and ports, she’s super convenient to use to run around doing direct deals with players.

My ‘specialized’ alts are basically just characters that strictly sell one type of item.

- Lvl 1 Draenei  Shaman in Exodar – Sells Bags, Arrows and Bullets

- Lvl 1 Draenei  Mage, Shaman, Paladin and Priest in Exodar – Glyph sellers

-  Lvl 70 Draenei Hunter in Dalaran – Gem Seller. Her high-level Engineering allows me to use the AH in Dalaran. Aspect of the Cheetah is also great between the AH, mailbox and bank.

-Pro Tips-

- Enchant your bank alt’s boots with Minor Speed.

- Buy a portal to Dalaran from a high level mage and set your hearthstone there. Now if the AH NPCs get killed or you need to do a trade in another city, you can get there quickly through Dalaran’s portal rooms.

- Make a female character! I know it sounds pretty silly, but my experiences have shown that people in general are friendlier to female characters allowing you to negotiate prices easier.

- Give her a name starting with the letter A! If someone lists an item at the same price as yours, your listing will be shown first due to your character’s name. Also, make sure her name is unobtrusive. Nobody wants to deal with an offensive character.

- Keep your alt anonymous! The less people who know who you are, the better.

Storage

The next step is getting SPACE to put all the stuff you will soon be accumulating.

-Bags-

You're going to want 4 bags for your personal inventory and 7 for your bank.

 Netherweave Bags are the best bang for your buck, they are cheap to make and have 16 slots to boot!

-Guild Bank-

With 98 slots in a tab and 6 tabs to expand on, Guild Banks are an amazing space option.

If you're having trouble getting 10 signatures, a tempting little blurb in trade chat about paying 5g per siggy usually does the trick ;)

-Mail Box-

Another storage solution is utilizing the in-game postal service. It only costs 30c per letter (30c for each additional item up to 12 per letter) to mail items between characters. However you need to be careful when using the mailbox for storage, because mail has an expiration date of 30 days.

Data

Data gathering is crucial to AHing. A server’s market is very volatile with super high prices one day and rock bottom prices the next. Learning these trends and knowing when to expect them is the key to success.

A great tool to collect and view AH data is the addon Auctioneer. 

Now SCAN, SCAN, SCAN! Scan in the morning, scan in the afternoon, scan at night, scan on weekdays, scan on weekends! Scan whenever you get a chance! It’s -so- important to have a huge database of auction prices done at varying times and days.

(Did that make anyone else hungry for Bagel Bites? You know, "Pizza in the morning, Pizza in the evening, Pizza at suppertime.” LOL!)

Before we even get started with Buying and Selling, you’re going to need at least a week’s worth of scanned data from Auctioneer.
So use this time to set up your bank alt, get familiar with the Auctioneer addon and scan scan scan.

I’ll see you next week with another article on Auctioneering :)

- Tella