There are many n00b stories surrounding the AH and how it takes some people a while to find it. A couple have been posted here in the comments, some I have heard and then there is my own story which does not differ much from most of the n00bs. Below is the conversation I had with my RL Friend introducing me to the AH.RL Friend: Grats on hitting level 20. Hey what skills are you leveling?
Me: Well I was herb & skinning, but I dropped the herb for leatherworking.
RLF: That will be useful for your hunter.
Me: Yeah I thought so too, except I have all these recipes that I will never use for myself.
RLF: Well, you can make them and sell them on the Auction House.
Me: Auction House? What's that?
And then I am told all about the auction house and I learn to stop vendoring my light leather. w00t.
Nowadays, I feel that I am no longer an Auction House n00b. I believe I have graduated and I'm pretty good at playing the market and there are some essential tools that are needed to maximize profit and minimize your expenses when you need to buy materials or items.
Those tools are: Auctioneer, a wonderful add-on and allakhazam.com.
Now Auctioneer only works if you spend sometime scanning the AH. Basically, you have to have your character sit there and the program looks at every auction and looks at the price ( about 15 to 20 minutes). If you are just installing Auctioneer, you probably need to do this three times in the first week you install and once a week thereafter. The more you do this the more reliable your data is going to be. It is important to get as much info as possible for those weird things you pick up in your travels as well as keeping tabs on popular items.
Another important time to scan auctioneer is after a major upgrade. After 2.1 was implemented the prices of knothide leather and netherweave cloth plummeted, I was hoping it was a momentary blip because I made a lot of money off of these materials, but alas it was not. Keep in mind that there can be other unforseen changes to the economy after upgrades, so to make sure you get a handle on these quickly, scan often.
Auctioneer is also very useful in making sure you don't get taken for a ride. If you want to buy some felweed so someone can make pots for you and there are only a few on the AH and the price is way higher than Auctioneer says it should be, then you should probably wait on buying that item until there are more on the AH.
Now the best way to use Allakhazam is when you find a rare or weird item that you may only have one or no scans of the item.
Several weeks ago, while doing Netherwing Dallies, Formula: Enchant Chest - Major Resilience dropped. I did not have any info in my auctioneer on the item, but it was a green enchant, I probably would have put it up on the AH for 20g or something. However, since I had no info, I went to Allakhazam and it told me that this measly green sells for 475 gold on average and I gave it to my RL friend (yes, the very same one who hipped me to the AH) in hopes that he would get his epic flight form sooner, who sold it for 350g.
So, those are some good ideas.
Of mixed use is prospecting the AH (buying low and selling high). I will do it sometimes, but only with items, that if they don't sell I can actually use (with some exceptions -- like Primal Mana on the AH for 2g each.) I did it recently with Don Santos' Famous Hunting Rifle. I found it on the AH for 1,000 gold and tried to sell it for 2,000. I wound up selling it for about 1,400 -- still a tidy little profit, but it took several weeks. (Auctioneer has an add-on called Bottom Scanner, that will recommend you buy things that are very low in price -- if you decide you want to go that route.)
Here is a bad idea: Cornering the Market -- or attempting to. In this circumstance, you buy up everything on the AH of one kind of herb, leather or cloth and then resell it at an inflated price. This is a bad idea because you can never truly corner the market in this game. I have cloth and leather stored in my bank toon that I wait for just such a moment and then throw a bunch of it up on the AH at prices significantly lower than the other seller has set and yet still higher than the normal market price and I and others who do that same thing make a tidy profit off of other people's risk.
Of absolute stupidity is what someone on my realm tried to do a last week and that is make gold off of something you obviously have no clue about. This person bought all the epic recipes on the AH (selling for around 300 to 800 gold). Then they proceeded to mark them all up to 1,500 gold, what they did not discern in many of these recipes is that the item was Bind on Pickup (BOP) which meant that only the crafter could ever use it. No crafter is going to buy a recipe for 1,500 gold, then get the mats that will either take weeks to farm or hundreds more gold to buy, just for a single piece of gear. I would like to think that this person did not even realize that they were BOP items and thought that if the crafter was going to make money off of the recipe they would be willing to pay top coin for it. Sadly they were mistaken and wound up slowly dropping the price all week. It also didn't help that no one else putting these recipes up on the AH followed this person's lead -- they kept the old prices.
One final note: Inflation. As time goes on, Auctioneer will not keep up with inflation. You will start to notice that most popular items are being listed at 5 to 10% higher than your Auctioneer has them for. Since gold, copper and silver are created out of thin air, and once your epic flying mount is bought, you have no mortgage to save for, inflation is always going to be a problem -- just keep farming and doing quests to keep up with the Joneses. (This may also happen in reverse with high ticket items, which get farmed more as more people get better geared and do higher instances and get better drops.)
In the end, it's all fake money anyway, so if you lose money on the AH, its not as bad as having your entire IRA in Enron -- just like the rest of the game, it is something to have fun with.
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