Auctioneer Tutorial – Using Appraiser

Ok, so now we are getting into the advanced stuff that you can do with Auctioneer to make gold in WoW. At this point, it is important that you collect at least 3 days worth of scans and preferably 5 or 6.  Perform a full scan at least once per day. The results you get out of Auctioneer are only as good as the data that goes in. You will need to use the full Auctioneer Suite for all the remaining posts in this tutorial series.

Appraiser

So, now you have auction data to work with, lets look at Appraiser. To get to it, click the Appraiser tab at the bottom of the Auction House window.

The left hand pane lists your inventory. Click on an item to work on posting it. At the top right of the Appraiser pane, you see information about the auction. Stack Size and Number allow you to set how many you want to sell at a time and how many total stacks you want to sell in this auction. In this example you can see we have chosen to separate our two Felsteel Stabilizers into two single item auctions instead of posting them in a stack of 2. Below the stack settings is the Auction Duration setting. Take a look at chapter 2 of this book for some discussion of stack sizes and auction duration settings.

At the top right is where we decide how much gold we are going to charge for the item. You can see the Bid and Buyout costs that will be used if we post the item now. You can manually edit these values if you need to. Above that is the Pricing Model menu. This is the most important part of the Appraiser tab when it comes to making fast gold. These options are not available in the Simple Auction Post tab but they are the key to making gold in WoW at the auction house, especially if you are a crafter or gatherer selling your own products.

The Pricing Model determines how the automatic pricing will be set.

Auctioneer Pricing Models

Simple: This is an  arithmetic mean (average) of prices seen over 3, 7 and 14 day intervals. This is more accurate over a longer period

StdDev: This calculates the standard deviation of the prices, then takes the arithmetic mean of all prices within 1.5 standard deviations of the simple mean; this may discard some extreme values.

Purchased: attempts to see auctions that were bought-out before expiration, and averages those buyouts

Market: An average of the results of the models listed above.

VendMarkup: Sets the price at 3* the amount you would get if you sold the item to an NPC vendor.

iLevel: provides a normalized average (discards extreme values like StdDev) of listed price for all items of the same rarity, type, and iLevel as the current item. For example, if you post a green, level 25 dagger, it will give a normalized average price for green, level 25 daggers.  Useful for pricing random green/blue BoE equipment.

Sales: Prices of items that you jave sold previously.  Displays data from BeanCounter on actual purchase and sale prices.  Is installed with BeanCounter, not separately.

I primarily use Market, iLevel and VendMarkup. Market gains accuracy as you collect data. At 3-5 days worth of scans you should be getting reasonably accurate results. I use this model for everything except equipment drops that don’t show up very often and don’t have much (or any) data. For these I use iLevel. For items that have no data, you can use VendMarkup model as a starting point. You can change the VendMarkup markup from 300% in the Configuration screen, but I find the default works pretty well.

You can always check the data listed for item in the bottom half of the screen to see if the prices the Market model is giving you seem accurate. You always have the option to undercut by checking the Enable Price Matching box. This will attempt to undercut using the price matching model that you have set in the Configuration screen (or you can use the default). Configuring price matching is discussed in the next chapter.

When you are ready to post the item, click the Post Item button at the bottom right of the window.

If you would like a detailed walkthrough of one effective Auctioneer strategy to get started really quickly, get my 21 Steps to Making Gold at the Auction House guide.

Series Navigation

<< Auctioneer Tutorial – Posting Items Using the Simple Auction Post TabAuctioneer Tutorial – Advanced Appraiser >>