WoW Economist

Here are a few basic pointers that are crucial to your understanding of the World of Warcraft Auction House:

1. The Cut: the inter-faction AHs located in Goblin cities take a 15% cut of the final selling price. However, since you should only be using these to transfer gold between your alliance and horde characters, this is largely irrelevant to being an investor.

The normal AHs take a 5% cut of the final price. That means that if you sell an item for 100g, you will only actually “get” 95g (the AH takes 5g). An easy rule of thumb is that for every 20g of the final selling price, the AH takes 1g. It is very important to keep this in mind when following advice here, as margins can often be quite small. For example, let’s say you buy a Living Ruby for 60g, cut it into a Runed Living Ruby and sell that for 62g. You would actually be losing 1g10s if the Runed Living Ruby sold. Why? Because the AH took a 5% cut of 62g which is 3g10s while the price difference with the Living Ruby was only 2g.

2. Auction Duration: The AH gives you a choice to select the duration the auction will remain until it expires and is returned to you via mail. The three options are 12, 24 and 48 hours. For the vast majority of auctions that are not listed very late at night, 12 hours should be sufficient for it to sell. The deposit price increases with longer times and will only be returned to you if the auction sells within that time.

The AH in our experience is a volatile market and while it is easy to predict in both the short and long term, it can be difficult between the two. What does this mean? It means that if I check auctions at 7pm, I can give you a reasonable conjecture as to how much a given item will be selling at in 3-4 hours based on the current trend and I can probably make, based on the evolution of the game, a decent estimate of what it will be selling at in a month or two but it is difficult for me to say anything accurate about the next 2-3 days or 2-3 weeks.

What’s the jist of that wall of text then? List your auctions for 12 hours, at prime time, and if it fails to sell, relist it again for 12 hours. The exception here is for items that have very low deposits relative to value or no deposit at all (example: enchanting mats). You can go ahead and list these for 24 or 48 hours and if you decide to cancel the auction and relist it, you don’t lose a single copper.

3. Pricing: You see 5 Large Prismatic Shards selling for 100g and the lowest price of an individual shard is 25g. You move quickly to buy the stack of 5 and relist them individually in the AH, a strategy that is discussed elsewhere in this blog. What price do you list them at? 22g? No. 23g? Fail more, nub. You list it at 24g99s99c because it will sell just as rapidly as if you listed it at 1c. This is the law of pricing that we recommend you to follow religiously. Always undercut by 1c. Period.