If you’re new to WoW Classic then the Auction House can be a bewildering experience, but if you can learn the basics it can be a handy source of income, allowing you to really make the most out of your chosen WoW Classic Profession.
The WoW Auction House (AH) is very simple in principle: you put items up for sale that other players can buy with gold. The WoW AH has a search function so players can search for specific items, and your items will remain for sale until the auction expires. This is a vital part of WoW Classic’s economy as players can skip the farming process by going straight to the Auction House and purchasing the item they’re looking for – if you get lucky and earn a rare drop that you don’t plan on using you can make some quick cash from it.
Professions also feed into the Auction House and general economy as you can use the AH to sell your wares and crafting materials to other players who don’t have the time or skills to farm it themselves.
For the entrepreneurs among you, you’ll be pleased to know that you can choose how much your items are selling for, allowing you to make a living from the Auction House by buying low and selling high.
The guide below will break down the basics of the Auction House and offer some sagely advice on how to get the most out of it if you’re new to WoW Classic.
WoW Classic Auction House locations
While every Auction House listing is connected between the three Auction Houses of your faction, Horde and Alliance each have three Auction Houses that they can visit and trade at. There are also neutral Auction Houses where you can trade across factions, but these take a high cut of the trade and are located in less popular areas of the map. There are a total of nine WoW Classic Auction Houses.
Horde Auction Houses
- Ogrimmar – close to the Durotar entrance to Ogrimmar, right of the Valley of Honor.
- Thunder Bluff – below the flight tower in the Lower Rise, spread between two tents.
- The Undercity – you’ll find multiple auctioneers in the central ring of The Undercity.
Alliance Auction Houses
- Darnassus – at the west end of Tradesnmen’s Terrace.
- Ironforge – southwest of the commons area.
- Stormwind – this is obvious, but head to the Trade District to find the Stormwind Auction House.
Neutral Auction Houses
- Booty Bay – you’ll have to search around Booty Bay in order track down all three auctioneers, but one is easy to spot near the inn.
- Gadgetzan – check out the first building on the right after entering Gadgetzan in order to trade with Auctioneer Beardo.
- Winterspring – there’s a building in Everlook with a telescope on the rood, which is where you can spot Auctioneer Grizzlin.
How to use the Auction House in WoW Classic
An auction is a listing of either one item or a stack of items that’s listed for sale. Every listing should have the name of the item so it’s easy to find, the quantity that’s for sale (capped at 20), the seller, the time left on the auction, the item level requirements, the current highest bid, and how much coin you’ll need to drop to buy the item or stack instantly.
The bid price and buyout price are crucial to making the Auction House work in your favour. Players don’t like waiting for a few hours to get a slightly cheaper item, so the buyout price is realistically the price you want to get right as a seller. You can also set the duration to one of four states: less than 30 minutes, 30 minutes to 2 hours, 2 hours to 12 hours, or 12 hours to 48 hours.
Duration matters because it affects what kind of deposit you need to put down for the listing. That’s right, there are deposits to consider. The deposit cost scales to the price at which you’d sell the item to a vendor and the shorter your auction listing the less you’ll have to pay as a deposit. What’s more, the faction and neutral Auction Houses have different deposits, with the neutral Auction Houses charging far, far more than the faction-based ones. Naturally, you get the deposit back, so it’s not so much of an issue if you’ve got spare cash.
Finally, there’s a cut that the Auction House takes from every item that you successfully sell, so while the price you list will be what the buyer pays for it, you will get less than that thanks to the middle man. Again, there’s some disparity between the cut taken by faction and neutral Auction Houses, with the faction cut being 5% and the neutral AH cut going all the way up to 30%. If you don’t want to lose any of your income then you can always resort to individual player trading, but this is time-consuming, and time is money – that’s literally the case with a WoW subscription.
How to make gold using the WoW Classic Auction House
There are lots of ways to make money either by selling your goods using the AH or by buying low and selling high. Selling materials is one of the easiest and simplest ways, as you there are always lots of rare resources out in the world that players will want to get their hands on immediately, especially as players start leveling WoW Classic Professions. If you want to make money by selling materials then you should sell them in different stack sizes so that players can purchase the right size stack for them – this gives you a neat niche in the market.
Alternatively, you can use the materials to craft an item, and then sell that on the AH as your primary source of income. Armour and weapons – especially ‘best in slot’ ones – will always be popular among players who want to race through levels and skip arduous quests or crafting procedures. Consumables are perhaps the most sought after crafted item you can sell on the AH, as groups will want to stock up on potions and food as they prepare for raids and dungeons.
Of course, if you have patience then you can make much more money by buying low and selling high. You’ll need a good bankroll to start down this path, and this is especially volatile at the start of WoW Classic when the markets are unstable. A relatively safe way of doing this is to always bid low on items with a long auction duration, so there’s little risk of you overpaying for anything. Still, this is not an easy or reliable way to make cash in WoW Classic, so we advise new players to avoid this, especially when the new economy is still settling.