My WoW Auction House basic guide.

Some people are really having hard time getting gold for their WoW character. Farming for gold is actually really easy, you just have to know how. The secret of making tons of WoW gold is the auction house of course, all you need to do is learn how to use it to your advantage. Majority of the paid gold farming guides out there resort to auction house actually. The last thing you want to do is buying gold online, by doing so, you will either get suspended or banned by Blizzard from playing WoW. So learn how to play auction house and make your easy gold.

When you start out as a new WoW character, you want to get at least one gathering skills for your profession if you don't have a high level toon to support you. You can train for your professions at level 5. You can only have two primary skills only, so pick them wisely. For primary skills, there are Alchemy, Blacksmith, Enchanting, Engineering, Inscription, Jewel Crafting, Leather Working, Tailoring, Mining, Herbalism, and Skinning. Your 3 gathering skills are of course Mining, Skinning and Herbalism. So you can pick 2 out of 3 gathering skills as your primary profession.

As a low level WoW toon, I always started out by taking mining(mineral gathering) and herbalism(flower gathering) as profession. They are the easiest way to earn gold from the auction house. Because blacksmith, engineering and jewel crafting all require minerals for their profession, and herbs are needed for alchemy and inscription. Therefore minerals and herbs are the quickest seller in auction house. Do note that you can only have one tracking on at the time if you pick both mining and herbalism for profession, so you may need to alternate the tracking to let you find the minerals or the herbs.

So gather your minerals, herbs or skinning as you questing. Once you have full stack at 20, set them aside in your bags. The next time you're in a city, go to the auction house. Using copper ore as example, you want to search the auction house first to see what the market is like. At the top left hand corner of auction house where it says "Name" is your search engine. You can type in the name of the item you want to search for, or click on the "name" box, and then go Shift- left click on the copper ore in your bag and click on the big red "search" button at the top right hand corner of auction house will bring up the search. You can narrow the search by highlight the categories and even sub categories on the left hand side of the auction. Minerals are a trade goods item, you'll find all the mineral listing under that category.

The above is an example for the search. There are addons out there for auction house that let you scan the auction house for all existing items and their recent prices. But I prefer to do the search manually because the market changes all the time, you may not be selling item at current market price if you go according to auctioneer addon. Plus it takes a while for the addons to scan the auction house.

Going back to the example above, as you can see there are not a lot of copper ore in there at the moment. The usually selling price usually around 1g range around most servers, but again, market demands changes all the time, so it's best to do the search for current prices. Now that you have the prices, go under the "Auctions" tab at the bottom left hand corner where it has "Browse", "Bids" and "Auctions" tabs.

And here's what you see on the "Auctions" tab. You have your auction item, starting price, duration, buyout price, deposits and Create Auction. So click and drag your copper ore into the auction item box at top left corner.

Here's my trick to playing the auction. As you can see above, the cheapest starting bid price for the full stack of auction is 2 gold, 1 silver & 50 copper. The buyout is at 3 gold. So, you can either match the buyout price at 3 gold or sell it just slightly under 3 gold, like 2g 90s for buyout. You also want your starting price at slightly lower then what that person has his in at. This is so that when people search for the item, you want it to come up on top of others. Because WoW players buying habit is usually buying the first one they see. Even if you match the price at 3g, if you have lower starting price then the others, the search will top the others. So the rule is, match the selling price or sell it slightly lower price, and always a lower starting price then others.

You can put them in for 12 hours period, 24 hours or 48 hours. The longer you put them in, the higher the deposits will be. I usually stick with 48 hours long. And once everything set, you "Create Auction". And just need to have some patient for your items to be sold.

The auction will always recommend a starting price, Do Not go by it. Also, you should always have a buyout price. If you don't, the auction will only allow people to bid on the starting price and you won't get your gold until the auction time runs out. That is assuming people bid on it of course.

WoW players shopping habit is "I'm looking for what I want and I want it Now". With no buyout price is annoying to those people, and therefore you'll loose potential customers. Remember that. Plus you may not even have people bid on your item if you don't have a super low starting price. Then the only customers you get with super low starting price are those auctioneer players who buy low and re-sell at higher price in Auction house. And you'll loose the maximum potential of what the item could have been sold at.

If you have the time and resource, by all means, search the auction house for those super low starting price items and bid on them. Should you win them, you can resell them for higher price and make your profit that way.

So I hope this will help you start up on playing the WoW auction house to make you gold you needed for playing the game. :)