Playing the Auction House / Flipping Items in WoW

[handshaka]

Hi there,

TLDR:
Is there any tutorial/guide/youtube guide or something explaining rather well for the current WoW game content what items are worth investing in for flipping them for quick and reliable profit? Particularly, when using the Zygor Gold Guide for the auction house (or similar tools/addons)? And/or basic/fundamental knowledge one should know about the current WoW economy?

For those who'd like more insight as to my background and why I ask this question:

I am a WoW player who did not really play for the past years since classic release and who has come back after the release of Legion. I'm playing on Frostwolf-EU. I'm really interested in getting the AH-flipping and making profits of it down. I'm fully aware of the limitations and all that come with the Gold Guide section related to the auction on the AH of the Zygor guide (such as that the Gold Guide can't magically take into consideration all relevant details being relevant to each specific WoW realm, the relevancy or reasons for demand of different items on the market etc.).

I mainly try to invest in too cheap offers of items that are rated "easy/green" by the Gold Guide and items which see a lot of trading in relation to the amount of items I'd buy for reselling (if I see two usually rather expensive ingredients being sold for 10G, which otherwise are sold for 150G+, then I'd simply buy the two and try to sell them at a bit less than 150G and I'd consider an estimated demand of, e.g., ~100 trades as being sufficient for making quick profits- or I'd consider buying out 1000 of some item that has an estimated demand of like 10.000+ and I'd expect the items to be able to make rather quick profits).
However, after trying out these basic ideas I don't quite seem to be very succesfull yet.
Also, my available amount of gold is rather limited as I basically just started playing the game again (even though I may lend more gold in the order of several hundred k to a million from a good friend of mine, if I was confident about what I was doing, which- currently- I'm not, but which I would really like to change).

[ZG Support 1]

TLDR: Nothing beats experience.

With everything you have in your post it sounds like you already have the basics down for what you need to watch for. It sounds like you might be running into some of the uncontrollable variables such as how many are posted or how quickly you are undercut after posting. Also the day of the week can play a big part in when to sell, weekends are always going to be lower sell prices due to more people online posting things and your auctions are more likely to be undercut very fast on the weekends.

The first thing to think about and decide on is to find one specific type of item that you want to work with on the AH. By this I mean crafting materials, xmog items, pets, mounts, etc. You'll want to think about the pros and cons of each type of item. Like crafting materials normally have a lot of sales every day but there are a lot more other people to compete with in that market. Or xmog items can be a steady income source but it takes patience and a lot of stock before you really start to reap any decent rewards from it. Pets and Mounts normally sell faster than the xmog items but will often require more cost to obtain them up front and can be more potential lost money depending on the competition.

Probably the easiest way to make gold with the least amount of risk is to level up a druid, raise up the mining and herbalism skills on the druid, and then use that toon to go around and farm up ores and herbs. With this method the only thing you are spending is time and no matter what you sell the materials for it will be a profit. The only downside to this is that it is normally limited in how much you'll actually be able to make each week and not necessarily the best way to go if you're wanting to make a lot of gold in a relatively short time frame. It is a good method to use tho to help build up gold that can then be used in one of the other markets to try to earn more gold.

Once you've figured out which market you want to work with that is when you ignore the other things and focus on doing buying/selling in that market only and with time you will learn the nuances of that market for your server. Only then will you really be doing good with gold making and be a lot more accurate in assessing what items to purchase. Once you're at that point you can then think about checking out another market to dabble in as well. The key is to learn each market one at a time as it can sometimes take months to understand the quirks of a market and if you're trying to learn multiple markets at the same time it will just confuse you. Learning a single market at a time also allows you to understand what tools you need for the market, sometimes the Zygor Gold guide can be helpful, sometimes a different AH addon might be more helpful. It depends on how you approach the AH and what systems/methods work best for you.

Now I'll give you a few numbers help illustrate my points and these are all based on my personal working in the AH from before we had a gold guide and from working with the gold guide after we created it. Currently I work the AH for about 20 minutes each day and I earn roughly 1 game token every week on my server. That puts me at about 150k profit per month for 20 minutes of time each day and then I have the rest of the day to do whatever I want. I make my money working xmog items and I still use the AH addon for this that I was using before we created the gold guide. To earn that much gold reliably I have a stock of around 450+ different items that are always posted on the AH and that stock cost me roughly 250k-350k to obtain before relisting them. Of course you don't need that much to start because you can't get that many pieces quickly at good prices and you'll slowly earn a profit as you slowly build your stock. It does however take a lot of time to get to the point I'm at. I believe it has taken me about 6 months to build up the stock to these numbers where I now have a reliable income as long as I work it every day. As an experiment I have started working the AH with my same xmog methods on a different server where I had a toon that had a few thousand gold to use as startup capital. It has been almost a month now since I started that and I've got about 35 items on the AH and earning a few hundred gold per day. Right now it's nothing to write home about but with patience as long as I keep at it I'm sure that eventually I'll be in about the same position as on my main server. Now when we released the gold guide I decided to mess around with it for a month to see what I could earn using the reselling of the crafting materials in with the Auctions section. For me I didn't know that market on my server so I just trusted in the guides to tell me what was a good deal. And while I wasn't rolling in gold trusting solely in the guide it was accurate enough that on the overall for the month I did earn about 300g per day profit. I'm sure that if I were to take a few months to learn that market and applied that knowledge to the gold guide suggestions it would have been a very handy tool to quickly spot deals that would be more reliable in earning the gold and less losses due to items not selling well.

Well I've rambled enough, I'm sure you've gotten the idea behind everything here.

[handshaka]

Tahnks for the reply! I guess you might be right with the building up my stocks part. Only from big numbers will I be able to make big numbers...I guess. Anyway, I'll try focusing on some specific pats of the market and see what I am able to make of it in the future, trying to optimize my methods. Thanks again!