If you have a crafting profession and you’d like to make money with it, look no further. This trio of addons will give you an efficient way to find and craft what sells for great profits.

AuctionLite

AuctionLite, much like it’s older and more well-known inspiration, Auctioneer, allows you to work with the Auction House in a fast and informed manner. By using the addon to do routine scans of all the posted auctions, you can get a very good idea of what sort of prices various items go for. To do this, simply visit an Auctioneer NPC. When you open the Auction House window, AuctionLite has added two new tabs, for Buying and Selling respectively. Click the Buy tab and you’ll see this:

See that button labeled “Full Scan”? Click it. In short order, much faster than Auctioneer, AuctionLite will report back saying the scan is complete. On my machine this consistently took under 15 seconds, where Auctioneer Advance, using the equivalent scan option, typically took 60-80 seconds. After doing so, any item that had listings at the time of the scan will display information about the prices in its tooltip.

As you can see, disenchantable items will also show the estimated value for the results of disenchanting the item, and all items with a known sell-to-vendor value will display that information as well.

Ready to sell something? Click that Sell tab. Drag an item from your bags to the empty space, or simply Alt+Right Click on it, and AuctionLite will do a fast scan of all current listings of that item. It will then show that list, sorted by Buyout price, to the right, and enter calculated prices for your own auctions in the box on the left. It also prints a short, detailed summary to your chat frame.

The way the suggested prices are calculated is configurable in the options window, but typically the Buyout and Bid prices selected will be to undercut existing auctions by a straight percentage. You can choose to base your prices off of the stack value or single item value, change the duration of each auction, and even batch-post multiple stacks of the item. If I have 15 Runic Healing Potions in my inventory, I could change the first box to read “3 stacks of 5” and post all 3 auctions with a single click, using the same pricing for each. It’s a very powerful tool. It makes buying things just as slick, but we’ll come back to that.

Skillet

The stock crafting window leaves a bit to be desired. It gets unwieldy as the number of recipes available grows, and it requires a fair deal of user attention to make several different items in a row. Enter Skillet, a crafting window enhancer. It gives you a bigger view into your recipe list, with filters, advanced sorting, and a search box. You can even queue several recipes in a row, planning ahead, and then you have but to click “Start” a single time for each recipe in the line, and you will churn out those items as if you were a little factory.

Skillet’s list will show you a set of two-three numbers in brackets next to the recipe name. The first two are counts of how many items you could craft: the first with what you have in inventory now, the second with what you also have in your bank. The third and last count will only show up when you have certain other addons enabled as well: how many you could craft counting reagents available on your alts. You can hover your mouse over a recipe in the list to see this information in more detail.

Now, what happens if you add something to your queue that you don’t actually have the mats for? Well, it won’t stop you. In the bottom right, there’s a button labeled “Shopping List”, and that opens a window that will gather up all the mats you still need to obtain to complete your current queue. Here I have plenty of Fire Leaf on hand, and a bunch of Enchanted Vials, but I don’t have any Lichbloom or Frost Lotus! The exact counts needed for me to finish 3 Flasks of Endless Rage are displayed in that shopping list.

Even without the main Skillet window open, you can still pop up the shopping list at any time with a simple slash command by typing it into your chat input box.

Eureka! Now we have something to go buy with AuctionLite.

Your Grocery List Meets Auction Heaven

Speak to an Auctioneer NPC again and click that Buy tab. Now pop up your shopping list with that slash command. You can enter the item name, and optionally an exact quantity, in the boxes at the top and click “Search”.

If you specified a quantity, when the search completes, you should see several auctions highlighted. These are automatically selected by AuctionLite to reach your specified quantity as inexpensively as possible. You just click “Approve” if everything looks kosher, and AuctionLite does the rest. You’ll have 3 Frost Lotus waiting in your mailbox before you know it.

What happens if it can’t find the right listings to get exactly your specified quantity? AuctionLite shows that it’s still awfully smart in this case, too. It will pick the cheapest auctions to reach your goal at minimum, and then do the math on what you could make back reselling the extra. A single click will complete the purchase(s).

If you didn’t specify a quantity, or see a good deal when you did, you can manually select auctions in the listing. Ctrl-clicking and shift-clicking behave as you would expect, adding a single auction, or a series of them, to the selection. Click “Buyout”, and you’ll get the same Approve or Cancel options as shown above.

Lastly, by clicking checkmarks next to search results you can add something you buy regularly to your Favorites. An option on the menu lets you view these items later at your convenience.

LilSparkysWorkshop

LSW is the glue that binds the first two addons together into one slick package. When you enable all three and log in, you’ll see:

Now, if you’ve kept up with doing AH scans every day or so, you’ll have all the information you’ll need on your road to riches. Open up your Skillet window again. Now you’ll notice two new columns; from left to right, they are sale value and reagent/materials cost. The sale value column intelligently chooses between vendor and AH value, and even disenchanting value if you use an addon like Enchantrix, which is part of the Auctioneer Suite. The materials column totals the price of buyables like Vials, etc. that you can get from a vendor, and AH price for anything you can’t. All this data is gleaned from AuctionLite’s scan histories. You can hover over either column, the item itself, or any of the ingredients for more information.

This allows you to view at a glance if an item is particularly profitable. (If you can gather all the ingredients on your own time, then of course it will be, regardless.) Miners can see whether their high-end ore is going to more valuable in its unrefined or smelted state. Jewelcrafters can see just what a difference there is between a cut and an uncut version of the same gem. Alchemists can see the best flasks to make for your available mats. The pricing information is always as current as your most recent AuctionLite scan. They’re so quick, why wouldn’t you do them regularly?

One last cool feature: LSW adds two new options to the sorting menu for Skillet: Profit and Cost. You can see, in ascending or descending order, the most-to-least expensive items you can craft, or the most profitable ones. On my server, despite how in demand they are, Runic Healing Potions often sell for below the combined value of their ingredients. Knowing that, I can avoid crafting them except with herbs I’ve gathered myself, and knowing such information is key in turning a profit.

Godspeed on your road to making enough gold to buy yourself that Mammoth you’ve been wanting!