If I were still playing, I'd be able to help more.

Anything with a high volume turnaround (glyphs gems enchant scrolls) are going to be good opportunities to make use of the crafting cycle.

Buying cheap herbs to mill into inks to turn into glyphs.

Buying cheap ore to prospect for gems.

Ore is also your enchanting material source (or at least it was at the time) because you can make rings and necklaces to disenchant.

If you're going to strictly buy/sell then you need to focus entirely on the raw material and equipped item market. But the most money will always be in the process of "laundering" mats via crafting skills.

If Volatile Earth sells well, then look into the other volatiles. Then try to find deals on herbs/ore and then send messages to the big glyph/gem sellers that you have some inventory to unload. If you buy 100 stacks of herbs for 18g and resell to a glyph maker for 25g, you've just made 700g with no real risk of ruin. (You'll always be able to at least get your money back)

Trade chat is your best friend if you're going to be strictly in the buy low/sell high market. Lowballing people who don't want to use the AH is your bread and butter there. Just make sure you stay clear of the people who are shouting in trade that they are BUYING an item that you can find on the AH for much less. 98% of the time that's a scam.

I started using TUJ-GE data (the undermine journal addon) to get a better idea of the real market value of things. It uses global cross realm data rather then data specific to your realm. It helps to not get thrown off by your local stats because people may have been listing some items at ridiculous prices causing the supposed market value to be way over inflated. You obviously need to have an idea of what your servers economic situation is like compared to the average though.

As for undercutting, I typically just use a lazy approach and continue to undercut whatever they list for (assuming it's a craftable or otherwise non-rare item). If the price gets to the point where it's not profitable I still aim to sell off my wares and then simply don't invest there again unless the market bounces back.

I however have my money spread over hundreds of items, so these losses are a fair trade for the amount of time and effort that needs to be spent managing my auctions. Profit by volume at a reduced effort rather then meticulously extracting every bit of gold from each item.

A simple market to get into if you can work a deal with guildies who have bs, lw,and tailoring (or better yet have hese across your alts) is to make the blue crafted pvp 377 gear. You'd be surprised at the consistency of these markets and they stabilize around the price of compenents. I don't have bs so I pay my guildies a premium of 10g an item and everyone walks away a winner. I crossed over 500k liquid last week and I sell things very passively

This thread kind of lit a fire under me. I had been neglecting gold making for a while and dropped to < 100k after buying a ton of stuff at the start of 4.3.

In about 2 weeks I have upped my market value to ~250,000:

- Leveled 525 blacksmithing on an alt that had no professions yet. Cost ~6-7k to power level but have more then made my gold back on it already. During levelling I D/E'd all the junk, sold transmog worthy gear, sold profitable cata products. Probably recup'd the full cost right there.

After 525 I have sold a few thousand gold worth of pvp gear already. Sold a 359 epic shield for 4500g profit. It's going well right off the bat.

- Glyphs - I'm on a full server so there are tons of people in the market. I don't move a lot of volume, but it's still almost pure profit what does sell.

- Enchanting - Market has settled since the patch and the profit margins have expanded and become much less volatile.

- 77-79 cata greens - These sell almost as fast I as I can re-list.

- Limited supply runs - Read about these on the Consortium. Get recipes and pets from vendors that nobody visits anymore and sell them on AH.

- Market resets - Reset Earthen Vitality enchant twice now and it's been hugely profitable. Very low risk since it only cost 50-100g to wipe the market (50x1-2g) and these enchants easily sell for 150-200g per.

- Flips - Started using snatch lists to watch for rare patterns, transmog gear, pets, etc. Nothing much to write home about yet, mostly just flipped some weapons and stuff for some reasonable profit.

Oh I forgot about this.

It is INCREDIBLY important to set up a snatch list for things. Mine was mostly crafting mats, and it makes buying cheap stuff very, very easy.

I was just checking sales on TUJ and noticed that the BS shield I sold actually sold for 10.5k, not the ~6.0k I thought I had my group set up to sell for. I must have had it setup wrong. Wow... 9k profit for one 359 item! That covers the BS cost and then some right there.

Italian,
You should reread the thread and take some peoples advice, there isn't any real reason to being this risk adverse about WoW. There are a multitude of ways to make money, the top ones are going to be high profit items, constantly monitoring and undercutting, cornering a market, or just pure volume. Most people use a strategy that uses more than one of those. Cornering and undercutting relentlessly either take a lot of time or investment to make work and can be super frustrating on some servers.

I find that pure volume is the best strategy and the reason why I like it is because it's just constant money pouring in, so you're never really stressed about sitting on product if the market is saturated for awhile. You just have to think outside the box.

Do some research and don't be afraid to take risks to see if there is a big pay off. Sometimes there is no market but that doesn't mean its dead, it might mean nobody is taking advantage.

I don't really play anymore, but for a time I was bored and was doing AH stuff. I had alts and alts and banks just filled up with stuff. I was all over the place doing herbs, ore, gems, cloth, I didn't put that much time into it, most of the work you can get addons to do for you. Just don't be afraid to take a risk with stuff is the best advice I can give you.

Here's an example, when I first started doing the AH, I noticed there wasn't a lot of people putting up bags, so I had my tailor make bags and I'd just buy out whatever people put up and I gouged for like two weeks straight before people started catching on and super undercutting and flooding. But that initial profit let me start branching into everything else I did. When you have hundreds and hundreds of auctions up all the time, it doesn't really matter if an idea fails or you lost a little money.

On a side note. The new TSM was just released today. There is pretty major sweeping changes in it's functionality and they are pushing it more towards being a replacement to Auctioneer/Auctionator rather then simply a tool for handling your bulk sales/buys.

Looks like the UJ addon needs reinstalled about weekly. Think they'll really keep up on updates?

How do you think TSM will be as an all-in-one addon?

Tips for someone who is ready to start making gold? (aside from re-reading the thread - some things have changed, obviously others haven't)

I see TSM has like.. 10 extra modules other than just the main addon. Which are good, which are necessary, which should be avoided?

Unless you have maxed out inscription and done all the research, many of the glyphs you are trying to sell will have very high competition on the AH, since anyone can learn them very easily.

If you are willing to invest a couple months in training up Minor and Northrend Inscription Research, and buy books of glyph mastery from the AH (which go for 1000g+ on my realm), then you will be able to make a lot of money from inscription. Otherwise, you shouldn't bother unless there is almost no competition on your server.

I use all of the TSM modules except for destroying, since it doesn't play well with my G13 macros and I never got the tempo of the fast clicking down well enough to actually make it faster.

Books are about 200-300 on my server, and tomorrow is my last Northrend research.

Already have a bakers dozen of books, have no problem buying the rest since one or two glyph sales will make up for the price.

Equal parts nervous and excited to be trying something new. Dropped herbing on my hunter, picked up BS. Tis good to have a miner available to smelt things when ore is cheaper than bars. ^_^

eta

... bought 190 copper bars. Needed exactly.. one to get the last point that extra stone skill ups gave XD

eta2

if I have a miner, it might be smart to check my mining bag before dropping 140g on silver ore, just in case, I dunno, i already have exactly more of what I need than what I"m buying..

eta3

About 4500g and 4 hours later, and I'm 400 BS with 2 new sockets, woot!

Have a load of rods and DEd stuff to sell, too. About 800g worth of dust alone from Wrath greens.

So the new TSM is definitely not a replacement for auctioneer. I was under the impression there would be more tools for d/e'ing for profit and stuff like that but there isn't. It also still doesn't seem like a good tool for selling 1 off items.

However. The new interface is a big step up. I like the grid display so I can see everything that I am going to post, price, name of seller who undercut me, etc etc. It's all really valuable and easier to catch errors/issues before I mass click the post button.

Also really enjoying the new ability to set my threshold using TUJ-GE data. Makes flipping rare items so much easier.

Bought 15 arcane crystals for about 20g each, xmute spec got me 21 arcanite bars for 7 arcanite rods. Sold one immediately for 250g.

Just hit cata bs and not even to 6k spent, I don't think, though probably very close.

Literally 3-4 clothies and rogues had been leveling bs at the same time. Pretty sure my costs were half of theirs due to being able to smelt ore.

ETA:

Ok, just about to hit 525. Spent a hair over 10k, but that could easily have been mitigated by thinking a step or two ahead. Getting the last 5 points making an epic shield that I more than had enough mats to craft. (And probably making a couple - Yes, had enough for 1 caster and 1 tank shield. Still have mats for 2-3 more. They sell for about 2k each here, so that should just about recoup my losses)

ETA2:

First night of listing stuff on the AH - Sold 1 of the 2 shields I made, and a ton of DE'd stuff, crafted BOEs, and weird bs crap, like grinding stones (15g, each? jesus!).

Made about 2300g on a strictly AH toon, and 2800g on the BS toon himself.

Snagged about a thousand gold worth of whiptail (about 60-65g a stack on my server), broke it down into about 25 glyphs that sell for 100-500g, got 'em all listed, but holy hell does some guy in TB relist faster than I can get thru my 3 toons.

Would remote auction house be an easy way to beat that, or just wait till he logs, or what?

(Checking TUJ, it looks like the guy took all of two one hour breaks on Saturday - one at 4 am, one at 7am.)

Sigh.. already identified 2 more 'on all the time' glyph sellers.

My server was like that too. I posted anyway and still managed 200-2000g of daily sales. There was a lot of variance, but the gold/hr invested was through the roof. And gold/hr is your most important stat.

Found a couple glyphs with only 1 person listing it for like 500. Immediately made 300+ on one sale. =)

It's all the competitive ones I worry about. Like, what's a fast way to cancel and relist glyphs slightly cheaper? Same question, but assume you only have 1 of each glyph (no stacks to list from without hitting the mailbox)?

Once a month I would use TSM to replenish my stock to 20 of each glyph.

I would post two at a time with a 48 hour listing and a 1g undercut and every morning I would just post. Sometimes I'd post several times per day, but I never ever ever cancelled.

Cancelling is a huge waste of time and might increase your gross profit, but it kills your gold/hr. I used to cancel, but quickly realized how pointless it was.

The only reason to cancel is if you don't have enough stock to handle all the posting.

Not really sure how to read the second question. I had three chars for glyph posting. They had enough inventory slots to hold one stack of each glyph for their assigned classes with a couple extra spots. There was zero inventory/mailbox management required. I went to the mailbox to grab profits and expired auctions, but that's it.

So just suck it up and make more glyphs, pretty much?

Seems like the best idea.

Already made half my gold back for the glyphs by selling just 2 glyphs with no competition. =D

Yeah, it takes a while to get to the point I was at with 20 of every glyph though. Takes a LOT of herbs (tens of thousands).

I initially tried to make 6 of everything but even that was too much ink. So to start, I looked at TSM for the highest priced glyphs and just made 3-4 of each one. If I had leftover mats, I'd go further down the list.

When you only have 3-4 of each glyph, you can't afford to post 2 at a time and not cancel. You either have to cancel (which sucks) or what I would personally do is just post one at a time and post in the morning/evening.

If cancelling is something that doesn't bother you, go for it. With a low number of postings, I guess it's not bad. But if you have 140 inventory slots of glyphs and 2 posted. It sucks to have to cancel nearly 300 auctions and wait for them to come out of the mailbox 50 at a time. (You can /reloadui to skip the mailbox waiting timer if you want)

Glyphs are nice because as you're seeing, the profit margins are astronomical. But don't let that be an excuse to let it consume you. Because it will. Trying to be an AH camper with the glyph market is literally a full time job.

I'm not sure if I'm understanding this correctly, but are you guys saying that you don't care to be the cheapest? You just leave your glyphs on there anyways?

I always struggle with not posting as the cheapest. I know if I went to the AH looking for something, I'm going to take whatever is the cheapest and disregard the rest.

On another note, one thing I've been doing is bidding on everything under the Vendor search. It's more for fun to see what comes out of it. I've won a few auctions from doing it. I usually have about 50 bids out at a time. It is only going to take one time where someone puts a bid out there for 1c for a 100g+ item.

Nothing vendors for 100g+, but your point is valid.

Put your vendor threshold to at least 25s or something. Otherwise you're going to wind up bidding on tons of things with a few copper profit. That's a giant waste of time.

My point with not cancelling is that you should just post more product and leave your now overpriced ones up there.

You post for 10g.

Asshat posts for 9g99s99c.

You post two more for 9g, but leave your 10g auctions up.

Asshat cancels his 9g99s99c auction and posts for 8g99s99c.

You post two more for 8g, and now also have two at 9g and two at 10g on the AH for a total of six auctions.

Once Asshat finally sells his, you have 6 auctions left up with good pricing. But you spent a fraction of the time that Asshat did, so you come out ahead on gold per hour.


Only cancel if you're out of inventory.

I meant, someone puts up an auction for 1c bid and buyout like 100g where the real market price is at. So I win the auction for 1c and then I can try to resell it for 100g instead of turning around and vendoring it. I might lose out on the vendor profit with the listing fees, but if I can get something to sell, it'll make up for that.

My biggest vendor item was a 22g profit, but most are in the silver range, and every now and then I get a 1 or 2g profit. It's adding up over time.

The only time I ever cancel is when my opponent's auctions have fallen off and I have glyphs listed at lower than optimal prices. TSM's new reset scan feature makes this incredibly easy.

The glyph market on my server is so competitive that I am currently purposely crashing the market for glyphs from trainer recipes and not crafting any more of those. Hopefully it will scare some people out of the market.