OK, so the past couple of posts have covered the setup for your control scheme, including choosing your niche and making your alt.  Now go ahead and send that alt a decent amount of gold and get ready for the meat and potatoes!

Auction House Control

How to properly dominate the Auction House in WoW

Controlling the Auction House in WoW boils down to a simple formula (one that can actually be applied to most markets outside of the game as well, but that’s a bit off topic) that can be replicated across practically any in-game market you choose to enter.  The steps are as follows:

  1. Identify the niche you want to control, and the most profitable item within it.  This is well and truly server dependent, and will require you to monitor your niche for a week or so to judge what is worth controlling and what isn’t.  I could write a whole guide on how to judge liquidity in the Auction House but it’s a bit beyond the scope of this guide.
  2. Once you’ve identified the item, make sure you have enough money to buy it out and to keep buying out any competitors.
  3. Relist your item at an inflated price in relatively small quantities to create the illusion of scarcity.
  4. Pick up the gold from your mailbox.

If you’ve chosen your niche appropriately, that’s really all there is to it.  If you’ve started small, scale it up by broadening your niche (i.e. go from red +str gems to all red gems to all gems) or moving into another one (which is the better option if you’re in a market with a lot of dud items) and keep expanding until you have to buy a new account to hold all the extra gold you’re carrying.

If you’re not doing this 7 days a week, I would strongly suggest listing items for 48 hours starting on Saturday morning, and buying on Sunday evening when most of the weekenders have put up their items at reduced “weekday” prices, although this pattern may vary depending on your server.

If you have any questions about this method, feel free to drop me a comment and I’ll respond back.

If you’re looking for more ways to make gold, make sure check out my review of Luke Brown’s WoW Gold Secrets!