My understanding here is the listing is posted for the buy order and your gold is put in "Escrow". When the seller has the item(s) you're buying, they are able to fill the order and the money and goods are exchanged. They don't get to take your money before the goods are procured, that would be bad design.

You would be better off thinking of this as a "sell now" feature. If you had farmed goods you could either put them up for auction and hope by tomorrow they are sold, or you could take the best price someone has listed as a buy order and get your gold right now.

It wouldn't work like that, the system would be more like this.

A farmer browses the AH and sees a buy order for, say, 5 stacks of Elementium Ore at 100g each. The farmer looks in his bag and says "Oh, I have those!", he loads his ore into some sort of interface window and hits "Accept order", the ore is taken from his bag and mailed to the buyer and the gold the buyer put down as a deposit with their order is given to the farmer, likely minus some kind of AH cut.

It would never be a "Hey man, here's 500g, go fetch me some X and bring it back later." sort of system.

Eh? There wouldn't be a separate exchange of gold and then items, the exchange of gold and items would happen at the same time. The current AH system - where people put up items which can be exchanged for gold - is exactly the same as the buy order system would be, only people would put up gold which can be exchanged for a certain item.

Oh, I must have misunderstood exactly what he meant. I get it now, thanks for clearing it up for me guys. I woke up about 5min before I read the article, I'll use that as my excuse haha

no, it's more like posting a bounty for the items you want. You tack up a buy-order for the items, say three stacks of elementium ore for about 200g a stack. A farmer comes back from his semi-weekly mining session in deepholm, sees the buy-order once he looks at the auction. Now, the farmer could look up the person who's posted it, see if they're online or not. He could never interact with the buyer. Whatever the case, he simply accepts the buy-order, turns over the elementium to the NPC, and receives the gold. How does the gold leave the buyer? He deposited it with the NPC when he posted the buy-order. What if nobody took the bait of the buy-order when it expires? He gets his gold back, minus a small cut to keep inflation down a bit.

They might need to still have the 1 hour delay before the seller gets his gold. As you remember, they made it like that because it somehow deters account hackers from laundering the stolen gold.

Think of the possibility for custom content, if an area was developed as a bounty board in addition to the AH. Players could essentially create their own fetch quests for commodities and offer a reward of gold. By using the system, the fetcher could even get a certain amount of xp if it was treated like a daily, or some other restrictions were put in place to avoid power leveling via bounty boarding. Buy orders would be a godsend for people that farm BoEs: instead of 1 person farming and hoping, if you really wanted something you could fund a small search army.

Very cool idea.

Buy order sounds good in theory. I would have to wait until I actually got to use the function to be able to know if it would work for me or not. It seems at first glance though it would slow down my interactions. I mean, it's great to have a buy order but if someone is selling a stack of ore for 200g, I am not going to sell it for 40g just because that's what someone is willing to shell out for it.