Every week, WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make money on the auction house, and Insider Trader, which is all about professions. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in here every Thursday, and email Basil with your comments, questions or hate mail!

If you are a crafter and you sell your items on the AH, chances are you've realized exactly how much time crafting can take. Obviously, a portion of the total crafting time is going to be spent actually crafting; however, not all of it is. A large portion of your time might be spend poring over the AH searching for prices on your finished goods and taking notes, as well as buying materials from the AH and vendors. There are addon solutions to this, and we're going to talk about a way to address the biggest time sinks involved in crafting: queuing and price management.

The Quick Auctions spinoffs

Zeroauctions and Auction Profit Master (hereafter referred to as ZA and APM) are both forks of the original glyph workhorse, Quick Auctions, which is dead and not coming back. They both do about the same thing, and they can both be used to help reduce the amount of time you spend crafting.


When they're installed, you'll see a button on your auctions tab called Summary. Click this, select your market, then click Get Data. This will not scan the whole AH like Auctioneer does, but it scans the market that you're working on. I'll use glyphs as my example, because as much as I hate circling back to the glyphs market all the time, it really does present the largest logistical challenge and everything you learn doing glyphs will be valid for your other markets. You can follow along with whatever market you're in, though.

Now the addon has a picture of the price for raw mats and finished goods, and you can get to work. Go down the list and click on everything you decide to craft. Click more for more quantity, and if you make a mistake, right-click to reduce the quantity. When you hover over an item, check out the tooltip box on the left for the mats and the current market levels. I always generally craft anything that's expensive and in short supply, and often craft stuff that's only one or the other.

Now open your trade skill and click the addon's button (my screenshot says "ZA", but APM might have another name). Now scroll to the bottom of the list, and there are the mats you need. If any are red, you're going to need to stock up. If it's vendor trash, run to the vendor, open your trade skill again, and click "buy" once. This will automatically buy as much vendor stuff as you need. You can't automatically buy on the AH, though -- but at least you have a list open in front of you.

Now that you have all your mats, click (once!) on the item at the top of the list, and it will start crafting. If you put in a quantity of 10, it will craft 10.

The advantages of automation

Here's what I used to do when I logged into my jewelcrafter to manually manage my crafting:

• manually search for all the cuts I could do
• remember the ones I wanted to cut
• figure out the cheapest way to get the mats needed and buy them
• forget the cuts I wanted to make
• look back in the AH to remind myself of the cuts I wanted to craft
• open a spreadsheet or notepad for "next time"
• craft all my goods
• realize I made several errors
• curse any errors that were unrecoverable
• buy more mats to fix the recoverable errors
• use QA or Auctioneer to mass-post my auctions
• get undercut immediately

Despite these challenges, I was able to get quite a large sum of money off this market. Now that I know that I can scan the AH, create a list and execute it automatically, I cut out quite a bit of time and user error in the process.

Auto-mailing makes it easy

I'm saving the process of selling with these addons for another post because it's a little over my word limit. I'd like to draw your attention to the "auto-mail" option, though. Assuming you have groups already set up, you can set certain alts to be the recipients of those groups (or individual ungrouped items) and have any character auto-mail them by checking the "auto-mail" box. I use this to send all my herbs to my scribe, all my glyphs to my posting alts, all my raw gems to my jewelcrafter and all my enchanting mats to my enchanter. The few times I want to mail something to another character (if I want to smelt instead of prospect ore, for example), I simply uncheck "auto-mail" and send it manually.

This feature will be very handy for me in Cataclysm when I start crafting for disenchantment again. I used to have to check back every 5 to 10 minutes while crafting greens and blues to empty out my bags. Now, I'll just craft them in front of the mailbox with auto-mail checked.

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Maximize your profits with more advice from Gold Capped plus the author's Call to Auction podcast. Do you have questions about selling, reselling and building your financial empire on the auction house? Basil is now taking questions for a special series, "Ask an auctioneer," at basil@wow.com.

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Tags: addons, ah, auction-house, auction-profit-master, auctioneering, auto-buy, auto-buy-za, crafting, guide, manage-crafting-apm, manage-crafting-za, patch-4-0-1, patch-4.0, patch-4.0.1, patch-401, patch4.0.1, patch401, queue, zero-auction, zeroauctions, zeroauctions-guide

Filed under: Economy, Add-Ons, Gold Capped