Preface
So you’re looking to make gold in TBC Classic WoW for your first flying mount, maybe even epic flying… but let’s face it, you’re lazy.
You could buy wow gold, but let’s face it, you’re broke or you just wouldn’t spend that kind of money on a video game. You don’t want to spend time going back to all the quest areas to earn your 2x gold from quests. You don’t want to spend hours upon hours out there farming primal airs, fires, etc. You don’t want to spend hours upon hours out there picking herbs or mining ore either.
You want an easy, stand in town all day and gain THOUSANDS in a week, never leaving your cozy inn and auction house. This is where the magic starts.
There are many addons that can help you maximize your profits and efficiency in WoW auction housing. Many people like Aux or Auctioneer for their noob-friendly usage that requires relatively no setup time.
The true “goblins” are making thousands of gold every week. They are dedicated to their craft, use Trade Skill Master (TSM). We won’t dive too deep into TSM in this article, as we will cover everything you need to know about TSM in a future post. Here, we will focus on the basic starting steps you can use with or without addons to get yourself started.
Introduction
How can I trust that you know was you’re talking about mister writer guy? Well here is a chart you’ll see from June 6th I invested about 1,000 gold into this to prepare. Between June 11th and June 18th, I turned it into over 5,410 gold in about 7 days. During this time, I did not step outside of town, I did not farm, I did not trade with any players. Pure auction house flipping and crafting.
Set Your Focus
The main thing you need to do right away, is pick your market. You do not want to start throwing gold at all the different markets like enchanting materials, tailoring, mining, primals, etc.
Each market has its own personality. Some are very volatile, swinging 20%+ in either direction… these can be good for flipping (buying low and selling high). Others are not volatile and hold a very steady value area… these can be good for flipping if you see very discounted postings, or for crafting if you know that the materials are selling for much less than the crafted product.
All of these behaviors are different for every market of the auction house. It is important to set your focus on a particular area where you want to focus your efforts on to get the most out of it.
What Should You Focus On?
Focus on a market you either already know very well, or you can use yourself. For example, if you have the tailoring profession and you know you need netherweave cloth and bolts to created imbued netherweave for your transmutes, you KNOW you will eventually need more. This would make investing in netherweave products less risky because you know you can hold onto them longer if the market dips, because you will still get some use out of them.
Let’s say you don’t have the enchanting or herbalism profession but you decide you are going to try buying and selling enchanting materials or herbs. If the market falls and prices and those materials are getting lower and lower, you will have to decide if you want to unload all of your stock now before the price gets even worse, or do you wait for a rebound.
You could choose to unload your stock in fear of the market falling more and not recovering, you just lost a large amount of your working capital to buy more with. If you choose to hold your stock because you feel that the market will recover, you now are stuck with stock for who knows how long and maybe most of your capital is in it, and you have no gold left to invest in other areas in the meantime.
These are just a few scenarios to illustrate that your focus should be on something that may be useful to you in some other way than selling directly on the auction house. Another example from Vanilla Classic Wow, would be warriors and alchemy. Personally, I would make rage potions and elixirs that I needed to consume in raids. Purchase the materials to make these whenever the costs are really really low, and make many of them. If the price of the potions and elixirs is in a profitable territory, then you can sell them on the auction house. If they are not profitable a the time, no big deal, you will use them anyway in your raids.
You can also focus on areas that you don’t have professions in. These can be more risky due to the points above, but if you know the market well, you mitigate a lot of the risk. Watch a market for at least a few days to understand what the typical high prices and low prices of those goods sell for, then you will know what value is good to buy and, good to sell at, how volatile that market is, and if that market is generally declining in cost, raising in cost, or relatively stable.
Set Your Target Profits and Rules
Always have a target profit you are working with. You want to set rules for yourself, and stick to those rules. NEVER stray from the rules you set for yourself, and you will be much more likely to be successful, just like the stock market. Some key things to factor into your plan:
- Always account for the 5% auction house fee. Whenever you calculate your break-even, divide your total cost by 0.95 and this will be your true break-even cost.
- Always target a minimum profit %. Personally, I will sell anything as long as I get a 10% profit after the auction house cut.
- Don’t buy more than you can safely sell. Make sure you are not overcommitting to a new market. Only buy enough materials or flipping stock that you think you can sell within just a day or two, at least to start with.
- Only buy materials when they are below the normal average cost for that product. If your material normally sells at 20 silver per piece, only buy it when it drops to 18 or 19 silver, unless the 20 silver price point is still going to get you profit and you have no stock left. the TSM addon can help with easily identifying what is under the market price.
Make Tracking Costs and Profits Easy For Yourself
If you really want to get the most out of your crafting or flipping, keep an Excel file or Google Sheet handy. Below is just an example of a workbook that only requires you to input the latest cost of any materials you are looking to buy.
You simply update the purchase cost of these goods, and the workbook will automatically calculate what you need to sell the crafted goods for to make a profit. It will even tell you the profit you make on each item you can craft. Email our website and we can supply you with a copy of this for your own purposes which you can fully customize. Alternatively, we can also help build you one for your own needs.
Which Items Will Make Me The Most Gold in TBC?
Every server and every market is very different, there are opportunities everywhere. If you have characters with professions, start with those when looking for potential profits. If you are looking for which professions will make the most gold, these really will be changing all the time. Pick a profession like blacksmithing, tailoring, jewelcrafting, etc, any of the crafting professions.
- Look into those markets you are already tapped into, and start searching the auction house and write down the current price of the materials used in the crafts you can make.
- Search the auction house for the crafts you can currently make. Note their selling prices
- Factor in the 5% auction house cut by totaling up all your material costs and dividing by 0.95.
- Now you can see the difference between the current selling price of the craft, and the total cost after auction house cut. Target the items you can make that have the most profit.
Some items will show that they are profitable, but they might be much harder to sell. TSM will also help with this as it has a built in feature to tell you how many of that good sells every day, and what the selling likelihood is. You can get away without it, but TSM definitely gives a ton of vital information that will cut out a lot of otherwise hard work on your part.
Wrap-Up
Now that you have some basics down, you can start targeting your choice market and looking for opportunities. Keep an eye out on The Games Cabin homepage for new editions of How To Make Gold in WoW for further opportunities and guides, such as our upcoming TSM guide on how to set up and get the most our of TSM.