Start Up Capital

You can start the AH game at any time and at any gold amount, however it takes money to make money and you’re going to need a little bit set aside for your Auction House endeavors.  Be aware that you may lose your investment in a bad deal, so depending on how much gold you currently have, I want you to send a portion of that to your bank alt. Please choose an amount that will not leave you begging for handouts to repair your gear! If you are a new player and do not have much gold to start out with, or you are un-comfortable taking from what limited funds you have, here are some easy ways to make a decent amount of gold to get you started.

Vendor Search

Auctioneer has a feature called ‘Vendor Search’ that will basically scan all the items on the Auction House and find items that you can re-sell to a vendor for profit. I usually do a quick vendor search after my daily ‘Get-all’ scan of the AH.

Questing

The exp reward for quests at max level are converted into gold, so if you leveled a character to 80 and skipped a few zones like Sholazar Basin, Icecrown, and Storm Peaks, you can go back to them and earn several thousand gold just through questing! Remember to vendor any grays and either disenchant any greens you find or put them on the AH! You can also quest in conjunction with farming.  The Frostborne, Brynhildar, and Sons of Hodir are a bit more out of the way, but are rife with spawn points of Icethorne, Lichbloom, and Saronite/Rich Saronite/Titanium.  The bonus quest for Sons of Hodir to turn in Everfrost Shards is also a nice way to get gold, as the quest gives you 6 gold per turn in, and a gray item that vendors for another gold.
 

Daily Quests

Daily Quests are a pretty good source of income. Some of my personal favorites are the Argent Tournament dailies and the Wolvar/Gorlock quests in Sholazar Basin.

One advantage of doing the Argent Tournament dailies is you can redeem the champion seals for pets that are quite popular sellers on the AH! With the Argent Tourney pets, you can try posting them on the Neutral Auction house, as this is the only means for people of the opposing faction to get your faction's pets. The Goblins are mean and like to take a hefty cut of your sale, so remember to factor that in while comparing prices.
 

Farming

If you have an Herbalist, Miner or Skinner you can farm for a few hours and sell the raw product on the AH.

Or you can fish for gold! A great place to fish is in Wintergrasp for Glacial Salmon, Musselback Sculpin and Nettlefish, which are the key ingredients in making Fish Feasts.

Another of my favorite fishing spots is at Lake Indu'le in Dragonblight. The lake has 4-5 pool spawns of Dragonfin Angelfish which are great sellers on the AH!

Honor Points / Badges

If you have extra badges or honor lying around from running heroics and battlegrounds, you can convert them into Gems to sell on the AH!

For badges I recommend buying either Purple, Orange or Green gems since the solid color gems cost double the amount of badges.

For honor I –ALWAYS- go with RED gems. Gems costs 10,000 honor straight across the board and Cardinal Rubies are hands-down the best selling gem.

Use the above mentioned methods for a few days and you should have plenty of gold to get you started in playing the Auction House!

Flipping

Now that you have some starting funds and ATLEAST a week’s worth of scanned data we can dive right into using it to turn a profit!

Flipping is the art of buying low and selling high. The great part about Flipping is you don’t need any professions to sell popular product and you don’t even need to follow a specific market! 

You can simply run a blank search through Auctioneer and then sort by the percent column. The lower the percent value, the more the item can be re-sold for.  

Make sure you check the average price of an item by hovering over it and seeing what Auctioneer says is the average moving price.
 

Pick popular items like Ore, Flasks, Herbs, Belt Buckles, Enchanting Mats, Frozen Orbs etc. or items that you know a lot about.

Buy the items that have a percent value less than 50% and then immediately ‘Flip’ them back onto the AH for approximately 80%.

For example if Frost Lotus normally go for 20g and you see one on the Auction House for 15g, buy it and re-list it for 17-18g.

The only time you don’t want to do that is when there are a lot of people selling Frost Lotus for less than the average price of 20g. 

In which case you can either decide to sell it for less than average (but more than what you paid for + ah cut) or you can hold on to the item until the market is more favorable.

That’s pretty much all there is to flipping! Buy low and sell high! As always, use your best judgment and common sense… If a deal seems way to good to be true, then it probably is.

Keep scanning the AH and Good-luck on finding some great deals! I’ll see you next week with more tips, tricks and strategies on Auctioneering!

- Tella