BfA Goldmaking: Flipping on the new AH

The new AH has been out for a while, and it’s time to look at how we can use the new functionality for flipping. Some markets are likely dead, but there are still going to be flipping opportunities, so let’s look at some good candidate markets in the current environment!

What’s the big change

You’re probably familiar with the new AH, but now is the time to do a quick recap of what has been changed. Before 8.3 anything stackable was sold in auctions of specific stack sizes. You could only buy the stacks that were posted so if someone had a stack of 200 up, you needed to buy the whole stack. Now you post however many you want to post and they all get priced at the same price. Players can buy any quantity they want and they will automatically get the newest X of that stackable item where X is the number they want to buy. 

There are also some changes to the posting and shopping UI that makes it easier to evaluate the price of both items you want to sell and items you want to buy, but this is less important than the stacking. 

Stack sizing is dead

One of the most notable tricks you could use when flipping was of course to buy up various uneven and small stack sizes and repost in a better stack size at a higher price. Better could be bigger to save time, or the exact amount needed for recipes. This trick usually meant you did not always have to be the cheapest to get sales, but it no longer works. 

This was an operation that actually increased the value of the auction. This being dead means that a lot of high volume markets will be less interesting. 

Supply and demand variation is not

To make money flipping now you need to do it in markets where the supply and demand varies over time in such a way that the market value varies. If players want to buy a lot of something if they want to buy it that is a good candidate, or if players typically farm a lot of it at a time. Another source can be fairly rare items that players seldom get or post on the AH. The fewer there is of an item the easier it will be to flip as you won’t get flooded in with new posts. The new AH will generally have more stable prices, at least for stackable items as it is MUCH easier for newbies to post at the current price. 

Candidate markets

So we’ll take a look at some candidate markets that can work in 8.3. Most of these haven’t been tested so I won’t be sharing any untested TSM strings, but you will usually want to do something along the lines of buying for 80% dbmarket maximum and selling for 100% dbmarket minimum. 

BoE Flipping

This market is essentially unchanged by the new AH. It is still very risky though, so unless you feel comfortable putting literally millions at risk this won’t be for you. I’ve written extensively about it before so I won’t do it again here. 

Rare but useful old expansion items

The title here is quite a handful. I am refering to items like the Medallions of the Legion for Legion rep, the Elixir of Rapid Mind for experience gain and similar items. These items are hard to farm and players will often buy more than one if they buy. So you can usually gradually pick up oversupply if it’s cheap and then sell a bunch at a time. These are both slow sellers though. Personally I lost a lot of gold buying Medallions just before BfA as the deflation hit and everything went down significantly in price, but that should have stabilized by now. 

Old world materials

Another candidate is old world materials. Particularly items like Living Steel, GHost Iron or Spirits of Harmony that are used in recipes that are still relevant. The MoP crafted mounts have been a goldmaking staple for a long while and ensured that these materials keep their value. They can be spiky and will probably vary in price. You can thus probably find them cheap and resell at a higher price after a while. You probably want to avoid posting if the price is too low, and you may even need to bark a bit in trade, but there are tons of options for processing as well so you will likely have a way out if it turns bad. 

Transmog

Transmog is in a similar boat to BoEs. It still works just as well. I personally haven’t flipped transmog in years and my old settings are likely extremely out of date, so you will have to find a better group. I’d suggest taking a look at Sheyrah’s public transmog group here: https://pastebin.com/tpTrmwmC

Lower population will likely be better

The fewer players the smaller the chance someone is online to continuously post these items. On smaller realms it is easier to buy out the whole AH for a reset, or to impact the price in other ways. This will likely give more variance in the price and larger opportunities to find deals. The sale rate will be lower however. It’s possible this will work well on a high pop realm as well, we just don’t know. 

TSM settings

Most of these markets will have to be customized for your realm. Start with the basic operations in my obsolete material flipping groups and build from there. Make sure your initial experiments are small in scale. Good luck!

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