This guide won´t make you rich in a couple of hours, and it´s not intended to. It will boost your income from following the other guides of money making or just from regular AH selling.
I´m assuming you´ve got at least some money to handle some transactions.
Needed Add-Ons
Basic rules/notions/sayings to have in mind and follow:
Our example item will be [itemico]Wool Cloth[/itemico]
The actual deal
Suppose you are trying to sell Wool Cloth, so first thing to do is check the market price. Type "Wool Cloth" in the serch field of the AH window and hit the Search button.
It goes for 35 silver average on my server, that would make 1 silver 75 copper each ( 35 / 20 = 1.75).
We are going to use the fact that very often, people undercut the price of smaller than maximum stacks of whatever item they are selling because of poor maths or just because the want to sell fast.
Now, using the PriceEach Add-On (or a calculator or your brain, it could take longer in most cases) go through the list and buyout all stacks where its unit price is under the market´s unit price for more than 5% - 10%. In this case, buy only the ones under 1 silver 60 copper each.
Important: Before you start buying, make sure you´ve got enough money to do this operation and have a little extra to put the items back in the AH, otherwise you´ll end up with no gold at all.
You need to buy every item that meets this criteria to maxout your chances of success.
Now get the items you´ve just bought and head back to the AH. Auction them and the ones you wanted to sell in the first place for slightly less than the market price just to foul the eye. In this case auction the wool for 33s and set the buyout to 34s 99c.
What have you done?
The items you are selling are now the ones with the lowest price and will be sold first.
How is this good for you?
1- Your items sell for sure.
2- You get some extra cash, sometimes a lot, from the difference between the buyout price of the stuff you bought and the price you set to it.
Practical analysis
Lets say you have 2 stacks of Wool Cloth x20.
Case A- You go ahead and auction them right away, this way the most money you could get is 70 silver if any.
Case B- You search de AH and using the procedure described above, buy 6 stacks of Wool Cloth x20 at an average price of 20 silver each stack. That would cost you 1 gold 20 silver. Now you Auction them all for 35 silver. They will get all sold in most cases and the results will be:
2 x (35) + 6 x (35 - 20) = 70 + 6 x 15 = 70 + 90 = 160 silver = 1 gold 60 silver
Results may vary, but clearly, in this exaple you more than double your earnings.
Hope it helps!
By Rappa