Food before flowers is a direct translation of the Japanese proverb, hana yori dango, which means putting practical concerns before aesthetic ones. Cclemon is here to share insights into practical addons and maximizing their use.

There probably aren’t many readers who haven’t heard of Auctioneer. This addon (or at least something similar) is nearly essential. At its most basic level this addon allows you to track prices of goods on the auction house so that you can automatically set prices for things you want to sell for an amount that they will sell for and make informed purchases knowing whether you are getting a good deal. If you are unfamiliar with the addon, allow me to recommend the official wiki for additional information; hopefully this article will cover most of the basics and a few of the advanced features.

Here’s the key to making money with the auction house: buy low, sell high. Well that’s the theory anyway. We want to make sure that you can get things you want at low prices and then post things at high prices that will sell. Auctioneer contains a number of tools to help you find good deals, and can help you to sell at good prices as well.

The first step in this process is finding out what prices are. Go to your nearest auction house (or least crowded, try the Exodar or Silvermoon City) and scan (the "play" button shown in the picture below). With the protected auction house window setting enabled to keep the auction house open, I engage in whatever crafting I can based on the materials in my bags because the scan usually takes a little while.

Hit scan with the play button:

This might take a while:

Accessing the options (click the stack of gold on the auctioneer popup toolbar to access this window), Util Modules, AHWindowControl, Protect the Auction House always:

Let’s start with selling at the best prices people are paying now that auctioneer knows what the prices are. Auctioneer offers a number of ways to let you know the price for dealing in specific goods and services. The easiest way is the tooltip that auctioneer adds:

 

The "Market Price" line will help you in transactions in the trade channel, whether buying or selling.

Now let’s look at ways to sell your goods.

The first way to sell is on the auction house. On the bottom of the Auction house window there is a tab named Appraiser:

Clicking on it you will see a screen like this:

A list of all the things you can sell in your bags is on the left sorted by rarity and then alphabetically.

In that list below the name of the item is a set of color coded numbers. This shows you how many of a certain item are available on the auction house at what percentage of the average price. By watching this carefully you can post your auctions at prices equal to or over the average price at times when you know that there aren’t lots of low priced auctions undercutting you. You may also decide that there are lots of low priced auctions and hold off on sales, or try to use the Trade channel instead. In this screen shot it is a less than ideal time to sell my Book of Glyph Mastery. Watching these numbers you will also see trends based on the rhythm of the day of the week or different seasons with prices. Raiding consumables and item modification related mats sell better the day after raid lockouts refresh due to increased demand. The auction house is often flooded with lower prices due to higher populations on weekends and during the summer.

Once you’ve decided that it’s a good time to post, set the stack size with the top slider and the number of stacks to sell with the second slider. People often use stacks of one for common mats because the low total price of the auction will cause it to show up on the first page of results for people searching with the default interface, even if there are lower per-unit prices available with larger stacks. You’ll also want to set stack sizes to amounts that people want to buy, for example most people only want one of a given glyph. You can adjust the pricing manually or allow auctioneer to give your goods an average market price, or undercut pricing with the Pricing model to use menu. Click post items to post at the bottom.

This screen can also help you find good deals of items you already have some of, scroll through the list of auctions of the items in the middle and click the Buy or Bid buttons directly below to purchase things priced low.

Some items will not sell at a price on the auction house higher than what a vendor will give you. Auctioneer will let you know about this too. When you mouse over goods or links to them auctioneer will show tooltips with the price of the good on the auction house, and the price a vendor will give you for something. By checking this you will sometimes see auctioneer recommend that you vendor an item:

One item that I often find posted on the auction house for prices below what the vendor gives (and I’ll show you how to do this for instant profit too below) is fel hide. If you are a leveling skinner, you might want to check the suggestion before posting that auction.

BUY LOW: Now that we know the prices things are going for, let’s look for some bargains.

If there are specific items you want (BoE items, darkmoon cards, crafting materials, etc.) go ahead and search in the auctioneer window and have it sort by percentage of average price (a column added by auctioneer). Note that this percentage sort may not work as intended, especially with certain kinds of goods. As I mentioned when talking about posting auctions the default Blizzard UI will only sort on the bid/buyout price of the auction so although the percentage sort will work within the "page" of goods found, there may be better per-unit prices of larger stacks in deeper pages. In particular, for items which players tend to purchase one at a time or only a few at a time such as enchanting mats, flasks, and so on, you will often see the first page of results flooded with median-to-high priced single stacks of the item, but if you flip to the fourth or fifth page you will find lower per-unit prices on stacks of ten or twenty. Although the unit-price is lower, the auction bid/buy price is higher so the wow server sends them in later pages even though auctioneer has been set to sort by percentage.

As an easy way to get around this issue, and in order to unlock more of auctioneer’s power, let me recommend using auctioneer’s search window. The only disadvantage to this window is that the data it uses is cached at the time you scan, and not perfectly up to date like the default auction house window. In most cases, if you scan just before using it though this won’t be a problem. To open the window click on the magnifying glass on auctioneer’s toolbar:

To search for specific items click on "Parameter" under "Searchers" on the left hand side:

Type the name of the item into the field just under "Item name" (not the one by "Saved searches," which I often end up doing). Other searches matching different parameters are also possible. In this case the parameters were set to find outland level herbs (Type: Trade Goods, SubType: Herb, Min item level 60, Max item level 70) so I could level inscription. After setting up your parameters click search near the bottom left of the panel.The results are shown below:

By searching for all outland level herbs and have them all sorted together I could find the best deal on herbs that will mill into the right kind of pigment without checking each kind of herb individually and then comparing their prices. In this panel of results I could sort by percentage or bid/buyout price to find the best deal. I hope this example gives you an idea of some of the things that are possible.  If you want to adjust the parameters after the search has taken place you can hide the results by pressing the little button on the left side (the plus sign).

The other searchers offer many other ways to buy low so that you can use for yourself or sell high again later. Let’s look at a few more.

The converter searcher finds things like enchanting essences that you can "use" to convert 3 lesser:1 greater or elemental/crystalized life or shadow or whatever, where by simply purchasing, converting and putting an item back on the AH you could make a profit. In the search settings below note that I have turned off bids, because I don’t want to wait around for it to complete, but just buyout and then repost. If you have greater patience than I (and more confidence in price stability so you don’t take a loss) you could go ahead and bid on items in the same way.

If you are an enchanter, use the disenchant module to find greens or other disenchantables that are priced lower than the value of the mats gained from disenchanting them. Auctioneer is smart about knowing what mats things will disenchant into, and has prices for those mats from your scan, so it can calculate whether you can make a profit in this manner. If you are leveling enchanting and want to find mats for cheap this is also a good place to check, because you can filter the level of mats (based on the required enchanting level sliders) that you want.

As I mentioned in the posting section, some people post items at prices lower than the vendor will pay for an item. Don’t expect to make lots of money at a time with this, but it can be a small source of income when done consistently.

Notice that at the point in the search when I switched back to the options, fel hide is in the list. When the search completed, there was a total of 15g of profit in buying out fel hide and vendoring it in the search results. As I was typing up these results, someone else had already bought them out before I got to them, so you should probably do the vendor search first, before posting auctions even, if you intend to try to make some pocket cash this way.

There are more searchers and filters and options and addons for specific professions that I could go through, but I’ll leave some of that space for you to discover on your own or for commenters to contribute below. As always I enjoy the feedback, and I’m looking forwards to sharing my tips with you again.

– Cclemon