Auction house trading is one of the most powerful ways to make gold in World of Warcraft. You can learn more about this strategy from these wow gold guide reviews.

The best way used to be with the help of the addon Auctioneer Classic. Regrettably, that addon was discontinued in October 2008, and the replacement, Auctioneer Advanced, is not very user-friendly, in my opinion.

The good news is that a new and better way to make gold in the Auction House has appeared.

The great thing about Auctioneer Classic was that it would scan the auction house for good deals, i.e. underpriced items, and allow you to buy those easily. Then you’d just relist them at the appropriate – higher – price and profit.

Nowadays, what you can do instead is manual searches.

Make a habit of investigating the price ranges of items. As an example, mithril ore might sell for 2 g on your server (look it up please). So when you see it for 1-1.5g each, buy it out and save it until prices hit 2 g at which time you list yours, undercutting the competition slightly.

This is easier to do once you have a little more gold. Using Auctioneer Classic you could start with 1g and turn it into 100+ g in a few short hours.

Thanks to the new method of manual searches, you can now easily start with a bit more gold, say 10-50g.

Now I will tell you some things to look for:

Especially when starting out, try to focus on things that can make you a lot of gold, but have  a low vendor sell price (and thus deposit). Some things that come to mind:

* Enchanting materials (no deposit)

* Food (high-end raiding food)

* Ore and bars like silver bars, gold bars, mithil ore, iron ore etc.

* Big stacks of stuff that I split up. One of my examples: bought 20 eternal fire for 310 g and sold all of ‘em for 460 g.

* Eternals (fire, earth, water, shadow, life, air)

* Crystallized elements (fire, earth, water, shadow, life, air)

* Herbs

* Leather

* Gems

Try to focus on learning a few items well, for example the eternals, before branching out. Focus on the most profitable items to earn maximum gold in minimum time. Consider the sell price and the demand of an item. Big demand and high price = good profit opportunity.

Manual searches are greatly facilitated by the use of the Auctionator addon, a must-have mod that I first learned about from The Secret Gold Guide.

Gold in knee-deep amounts can be made at the Auction Houses in World of Warcraft if you know what you are doing. I've traded a lof of various stuff, and have managed to make many thousand gold, on just one of my characters. What I've discovered is that few players really maximize their auction house methods. I've observed a number of common mistakes wow players make at the auction house, here are some of them.

Keep in mind this is a basic guide. If you are serious about maximizing your profits, please read this entire article, and then proceed to have a look at Secret Gold Guide by Hayden Hawke.

1. Selling too cheaply. Underpricing may not be the most common mistake, but it’s a devastating one nonetheless. For example, some people might sell mageweave cloth for 2 g per stack when prices are temporarily depressed. Such price extremes are corrected back to the normal price range after a while.

   If you don't know the value of an item, look it up on wow.allakhazam.com. Allakhazam is a great place to look things up, especially for rarely-seen items like som recipes, books, formulas, plans, and blues and purples that you are not used to seeing auctioned. 

2. Selling too expensively. Everybody wants a maximum profit on the items they are listing, right? The absolute majority certainly want to. The problem is that the deposit is usually quite high for armor and weapons, but also for other items such as runecloth.

   Rapid selling of blue and purple items can be achieved by listing them at "bargain" prices. Rather than selling items expensively I want to sell them quickly, otherwise I have to pay deposit fees while potential buyers fret about and wait for lower prices. Let's say an item has a regular price of 65 g, I'd probably sell it for only 50 g, just to get it sold.

   If the item has a high deposit, get it sold quickly or you'll lose money on the deposit.

3. Not using the 80/20 rule. The 80/20 principle is extremely useful, perhaps you've read about it? It states that 80% of your results will come from 20% of your efforts, and it holds true across a number of areas, even World of Warcraft.

I began selling almost all items (white quality or better) I found after I discovered just how profitable the auction houses of World of Warcraft can be. Some would do well, while others just ended up in my inbox. I found myself spending a lot of precious time relisting items that wouldn't sell.So I made the decision to optimize my trading, i.e. focus on the 20% of my effort that brought in 80% of the gold:

- Items which had little value at the auction house above the vendor sell price, I started selling to vendors. Items that have a low real price difference between the AH and vendors, for instance common recipes and formulas worth 1 g 50 s at the AH and only 30 s at a vendor. Also a lot of green items.
- At the cheap end of the scale sales were quicker, so I lowered my starting bids and buyouts accordingly.
- I created an alt and began using it for the sole purpose of selling and trading the AH. Doing so saves a lot of time.

Doing so gave me more time to grind, quest and raid, which can also be profitable and above all, fun. Ignore the 80% of actions that account for only 20% of your results, focus on the 20% that bring you 80% of your profits, thus you will have a better (and wading-in-gold) World of Warcraft-experience.

For additional auction house tips, I recommend Hayden's Gold Guide, which has a separate guide to make money on the AH.