Want to get Gold Capped? This column will show you how, and is written by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, also of outdps.com, the hunting party podcast, and the call to auction podcast.

Auctioneer is a wonderful addon I've mentioned a few times already, and today we're going to talk about how to use it to sell your goods efficiently. First up, go download and install it. Now, when you open the auction house, you will see a different interface. We'll be going over a bunch of other useful functionality this has in another post, but today, we're focusing on selling. Do a quick scan by clicking on the fast forward arrow:


You should make a point of scanning the AH this way as often as possible, but generally not more than a few times a day. I do it every two days, or whenever I need the data. This allows auctioneer to learn what items are worth in your economy, by keeping track of the listing price over time.



Selling with appraiser

You have two primary types of selling-- one where you are selling a lot of a single item, and one where you are selling a few of many types of items. In the both cases, you'll want to use the appraiser tool. Click the appraiser tab on the bottom of the AH window, and note that everything you can sell is listed to the left, and your competition is in the middle. Click the refresh button to update your scan data for just this item.


Now, the best practices for selling many types of items is to sell them in multiple types of stacks. Appraiser has a slider for stack size, and you can either enter in your own unit price manually, or use a default pricing scheme. Pricing schemes are interesting little buggers, but you are generally safe with leaving it set to "market". If you manually change your price, this will automatically change to "fixed". In case you're wondering, putting it at "market" assigns a value based on the historic price data you have for this. Personally, I tend to either undercut heavily, or if there's little stock or competition, overprice. Rarely in-between.

Note the check box for "enable price matching"- we'll go over configuring this in a sec, but be aware that this will try to undercut you competitors.


Selling automatically

In appraiser, you also have the ability to automatically post a bunch of different types items. It takes a bit of setting up, but once you do it once, you can log in and post all your tagged auto-post items automatically with a single click. First, we need to configure our undercut settings. To set it up so you undercut everything by 10.5% when you check "enable price matching", click the "configure" button at the top, and you will find the appraiser settings. You can leave these mostly default, however I like to change the bid percent to 0%, so it always prices bid and buyout the same.



Now click on the "match modules" category, then on "Undercut". This page is where we specify the default undercutting behavior.


The most important part of this is the undercut percent -- you could alternately choose to undercut by a certain fixed value (like, say, one copper). Also important are the sliders just above that. The first one is how far below market price undercut will function, and the second one is how much it will mark up above market value if you have no competition. I find 100% and 75% suit my needs.

The way you see it set up here, whenever that box is checked, it will always undercut the lowest auction by 10.5%, and if I have no competition, will add a 75% markup over my pricing scheme (fixed or market, depending on the product).

Now that we have our undercutting configured, select each item on the left you want to automate, and check the "enable batch posting" box. Set the quantity and stack size for each one (ideally this will not change), and then check "enable price matching". Now we need price data. If your scan is still fresh, you can just skip this step, but if you only want to scan the items in your bag, alt-click the "Batch post" button. This will refresh the data for any item you've flagged for batch posting. Once your data is good, you batch post everything you marked in the first step by ctrl-alt-shift-clicking the same button.


Reinventing the ... what?

Auctioneer's batch posting is an extremely powerful tool that lets you participate in way more markets than if you had to do everything manually. This function is also performed very well by other addons like QuickAuctions 3, however I'll detail this in another post. The reason I still use Auctioneer for many non-glyph markets that require batch posting is that Auctioneer doesn't need to have a custom fallback price for each and every product you sell. The price matching function will default back to a value based on market price.

For example: it's fine in the glyph market to have all of your glyphs fall back to, say, 40g if you have no competition. If you're dealing in raw gems, however, you'd have to go and manually manage the fallback price for all your gem categories: rare, epic, and uncommon for each type of ore you prospect.

Nothing's perfect

One notable missing feature in Auctioneer is the ability to mass-cancel auctions. I have a quick and dirty solution for this (of course): a couple of little scripts:

This one cancels all auctions by name:

/run local i=1;local n=1;while n ~= nil do n=GetAuctionItemInfo("owner",i);if n~=nil and strfind(n,"^Scroll") then CancelAuction(i) end i=i+1 end

I simply change "^Scroll" to whatever it is I need to cancel. Here's another one you can use to cancel based on time left:

/script local o="owner" p=GetNumAuctionItems(o) i=p while (i>0) do local _,_,c,_,_,_,_,_,_,b,_,_=GetAuctionItemInfo(o,i) t=GetAuctionItemTimeLeft(o,i) if((c>0)and(b==0)and(t<2))then CancelAuction(i) end i=i-1 end

This will cancel any auctions that say have a short ("30m") or medium ("2h") time left. You can simply change the section where it says "t<2" to suit your needs. "t==3" will cancel all auctions with a long ("2h-12h") time left, but leave all the short, medium, and very long auctions (t==4) alone.

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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: appraiser, auction-house, auctioneer, auctions, batch-posting, bulk-posting, gold, gold-capped, macros, selling, tradeskill, undercut, undercutting

Filed under: Gold Capped