Every enterprising entrepreneur needs tools to manage their business. These tools will help us overcome the inherent inefficiency of the default UI. The new interface changes coming in patch 3.3.3 will solve some problems (mostly for posting en masse) but will not help us with other parts of the equation.

Auctions

The first thing you'll need is something that will let you manage auctions. I use different addons for different businesses:

• Auctioneer is the most rounded and full featured auction house addon available. It keeps a local database of item prices for long term trending data, it has pricing modules that can help you intelligently and automatically price your goods, it can be used to automatically disenchant, mill, and prospect raw goods, and it has a feature that lets you find the best deals for the items you watch. There will be an exhaustive guide to these features coming soon, but for now, download it.
• QuickAuctions3 is a single-purpose addon that will be invaluable for any market like glyphs, where you have hundreds of types of items, some of which require listing several auctions at a time. It does two things better than auctioneer: it allows you to cancel undercut auctions efficiently and define more granular undercutting scheme.
• Lastly, there's a tiny addon called AHSearch that lets you save searches and access them with a dropdown list. Not efficient for watching hundreds of items, but efficient for commodities.

Mail

The next thing you will need is a good mail addon.

• Once you go postal for incoming mail, you never go back. The game's mailbox is capable of serving you 50 mails at a time, and once you pull 50 in from the server, you need to wait 60 seconds before you can get the next 50. Postal knows this, and tells you how many more messages are queued on the server, as well as lets you open all your auction mail automatically. Pro tip: if you've tweak postal to go as fast as it can go, you'll have 40 seconds (depending on lag) of downtime between batches of mail. You can /reloadui to force the next batch to appear, however if you have a lot of addons going, this process might well take more than you would have gotten just by waiting.
• For outgoing mail, it's a little more complex. There are addons that were designed to automatically mail certain configurable items to specific characters, however they're out of date. QA3 has a beta feature for this, but I haven't tried it yet. My quick and dirty solution is to use Postal's dropdown list for alts, and use a macro that will fill up my mail with items based on either name or quality.
  • Here's the macro I modified for mailing by name. Simply change "Saronite O" to whatever it is you're trying to mail:
    /run for bag=0,4 do for slot=1,GetContainerNumSlots(bag) do local item=GetContainerItemLink(bag,slot) if item and item:find("Saronite O") then UseContainerItem(bag,slot) end end end
  • And here's the macro I use to send greens for disenchanting. Be careful about this one-- it will try to send anything that's green quality, so if you have a non-soulbound green you don't want to send, you might want to use the name macro instead:
    /run for bag=0,4 do for slot=1,GetContainerNumSlots(bag) do local texture,itemCount,locked,quality=GetContainerItemInfo(bag,slot) if quality==2 then UseContainerItem(bag,slot) end end end

Inventory

The next indispensable addon you will need is something to manage your inventory. When you have a banker with tons of similar looking products and mats, it can be a real time saver to be able to open the filter window of Bagnon and just type in "scroll" to locate all your enchantment scrolls. A nice fringe benefit here is that you can see what's in the bank or bags of any of your characters without having to go to the bank (or that character).

Another addon that can tell you about your inventory that's not at hand is Altoholic-- I don't use it, however, because it's too resource heavy. If you already use it for alts, however, it will add some functionality to your auction house business.

Crafting

Lastly, while you certainly can use the default crafting UI, it's pretty bad. There are no queues, there aren't any market prices, and it's about as dumb as a bag of rocks. If you want to trade up, I highly recommend LilSparky's Workshop (as mentioned in my last column), as well as the LilSparky fork of Skillet. The guy who writes LilSparky is keeping this duct-taped together, but barely. This Skillet fork is a little buggy sometimes, so be prepared to /reloadui, and remember, you can always bypass it by shift-clicking on your tradeskills.

• LilSparky, on its own, will add information to just about any tradeskill window showing you your cost to make something, as well as the current market price.
• Skillet's killer feature is that you can open your profession window, sort by profitability (or price), and then just craft the things you will make money on. It also supports a queue and shopping list, so you can go through adding all the profitable items that you may not have the mats for now. You then drop by the vendor to pick up your vendor components, your banks and alts to pick up any thing they have that you need with a single "purchase" button. Note: this is the buggiest feature of this addon, so be careful the check what you are about to buy. Sometimes it forgets that you have some of your required mats already.

Addons

The default method of managing addons is manual and annoying. Addon Control Panel (slightly aged WoW.com profile here) helps with the headache. It lets you define profiles and switch between them with a simple UI reload. Also, some addons can be loaded without requiring a reload!

Now what?

Once you have all this stuff installed, start doing regular auctioneer scans so your computer has a good idea of what things are worth. Also, go into every tradeskill you have, and sort LilSparky's data by profitability. Focus on the things you know will sell-- raiding or pvp consumables, permanent gear enhancements, quest items, profession leveling items, etc. If you can't tell, research the item and guess, and learn from your successes and failures. Each profession has something that's profitable, all you need to do is find it!

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Being an auctioneer is like being able to print money. Or gold, as it were. Wait, that doesn't make sense... you can print on gold, but you can't print gold. That would be closer to transmutation? I can transmute titanium, but that's only worth it if the price of saronite is low enough to justify the time spent making it. I need some sort of analogy here. Whatever, I'll figure it out later. Making gold? Every week, Gold Capped will teach you the tricks of the trade. From setting up your auction addons and user interface, to cross faction arbitrage, to learning how to use your tradeskills.

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Tags: addons, auction-house, auction-house-ui, featured, gold, gold-guide, gold-making, gold-strat, gold-strategy, gold-strats, gold-tips, world-of-wacraft-money-making, world-of-warcraft-easy-gold, world-of-warcraft-gold, world-of-warcraft-money-making-guide, wow-gold, wow-gold-guide, wow-gold-legal, wow-gold-strategy, wow-gold-tips, wow-money, wow-money-guide, wow-money-making-guide

Filed under: Gold Capped