The basics of trading

Making gold on the auction house in world of warcraft is just like earning money in the real world. The price is determined by supply and demand. There are a few things we can learn from this in relation to wow.

  • Prices of consumables will raise the day after the weekly ID reset, since they will be in higher demand
  • Ores, Leather and Herbs are a bit dependent on the server, but typically, people will farm a lot on the weekend and sell at the start of the week, so that’s when you want to buy your materials.
  • The more work you put in, the more the end product is worth.

Using crafting professions to increase profit

simple buy low/sell high method

To make gold with the auction house, you could just buy Leather when it is cheap, and resell it when it is expensive. This is a viable strategy and, when done right, can work very well. But, if you want a more consistent income and don’t mind spending a bit more time on it, you should use professions. Here is an example:

Let’s say you shoot some cheap Runecloth. You pay 1 gold per stack and you get 10 stacks, so you pay 10 gold. Now, you could wait until the price rises a little bit, let’s say you can sell it at 1.3g per stack.


10 x 1g = 10g in original cost.
10 x 1.3g = 13g in sales,

Which makes 3 gold profit. Not bad for one simple trade, which probably didn’t take you longer than 5 or 10 minutes overall, but you could make a lot more from this, using tailoring. Here’s how:

advanced auction house method

Take the Runecloth and make 40 Bolts of Runecloth. Then get some Rugged Leather, and make sure you get it as cheap as possible, too. You will also need 8 Rune Thread.


10 x 1g = 10g for the Runecloth
16 x 0.1g = 1.6g for the Leather (on a typical server, this is quite a high price)
8 x 0.5g = 4g for the Rune Thread (without reputation discount)
TOTAL COST: 15.6g.

Now, we make all this into 8 Runecloth Bags, which sell for 2.5g – 3g. You want to wait until the price is as high as possible, don’t rush it.


8 x 2.5g = 20g (worst case scenario)

That makes 5g profit, instead of 3g. That might not seem like a lot, but when you are crafting 100 instead of 8 bags, it makes a massive difference. And all of that just for an additional 5 to 10 minutes of crafting some stuff. You could even get a friend to craft the bags for you, or pay someone 1g for it, you would still make more gold.

How to influence the prices on the auction house

Of course, the above example is only the most widely known path that many people take. If you can find your niche on your server, though, you can truly dominate the market in that niche. Let’s say, for example, you have a couple of hundred gold spare from you trading en devours, and you are selling agility potions on your server. Now, if you have enough gold, and keep in mind that this is still quite a risk, you could start buying up the materials that are needed for that potion, and banking them. Just keep them on a bank char and only post as many potions as you think you will sell, never flood the market. Keep hoarding the raw material, and eventually, the price of the potions will naturally rise. Now you have an advantage: You have a large stockpile of material that you bought cheaper, and if you can hold the price up at a certain level, you can basically control the price for this specific item in the game.