Material flipping is still an absolute blast on the classic AH! The easiest gold you will ever make!

Today we will revisit one of my favorite goldmaking methods and what I consider the absolute best way to learn the Auction House and flipping based strategies.

Learning by doing

You can only really learn playing the Auction House by operation on the Auction House. So you need to los esome gold and earn some gold and then you take the knowledge with you to improve your approach. Material flipping will let you limit your losses and quickly get some wins, to help accelerate the learning process!

The basics

Prices in WoW fluctuate on a daily and weekly basis. This is accelerated in classic as the maximum time you can post auctions is 24 hours. Items sell, auctions expire and players buy and need items at vastly varying rates. Consumables typically sell on popular raid nighs as an example. All of this typically leads to prices that vary around some value over the course of a day or week. So if you can buy when the price is below average and sell when it is above average you will make a profit.

TSM market value

My approach is to use the TSM market value price source as a basis. This is a weighted average of prices over the last 14 days which excludes outliers. Many materials will vary in price between 70 and 150 % of this value quite often. My preferred approach is to buy aggressively when prices are low and to sell relatively aggressively as well. Buy low, sell normal is the mantra. This ensures you sell items quickly and you don’t need to take the risks involved in trying to reset the price above the market value. This also takes advantage of the fact that many mass crafters will value their materials at TSM market value when making profit calculations. So if you are selling at that price, then you are capturing the largest buyers of your materials.

Best items to focus on

All tradeskill materials can work, but herbs and enchanting materials are my favorites. This is due to the low deposit costs caused by generally low vendor sell prices. Herbs also have massive demand from consumables. That being said I have flipped every material type in classic and they all work.

Common pitfalls

Vendor sell price

Deposit costs scale with the vendor selling price of an item. If the current price is close to the vendor price then even a single expired auction will kill your profits completely. My rule of thumb is to focus on 5x vendor sell price materials only. You can do lower prices, but that requires more understanding of the demand for that specific item, so be prepared to learn the hard way with some losses if you want to take the chance.

Price collapse

Once in a while prices will be low because demand is collapsing and with it the price. This happens less often in classic as the game is mostly figured out, but it can happen. As an example being stuck with massive stocks of fire protection potion materials when AQ rolls around will expose you to some very real risks.

The walkthrough

Grab my TSM settings below and get to work. I like to do one material type at the time to make scan times not too long. Simply run a shopping scan. Then you check the prices and volume on anything that shows up with less than 100% in the rightmost column. In theory you should be willing to buy everything that shows up, as it is at 80% or less than the current market value.

Then you collect all the materials and run an auctioning scan to post them back. The settings will post at around 100% market value, possibly slightly above. The operation only considers stacks of the same size when posting as the real market for 20 stacks is actually different than the market for 1 stacks.

TSM Settings:

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