Sold! To the gentleman at the back with the green skin and tusks.

One of the things I've never really got into in WOW is the auction house, this isn't due to a lack of interest, in fact the economy in WOW and how massively it varies from server to server fascinates me; I suppose the main reason I haven't bothered is the time it takes to make money, I've always had enough gold to get by, but never been filthy rich in WOW terms, but providing I could get hold of all the stuff I needed for raiding I would stay away. If I needed reagents I'd generally go grind for them, the only occasions I would venture into the Auction House was when I was short of time before a raid, needed a couple of materials to level up a trade skill, or when something was on there which I needed but was on for less than the time it would cost me to grind it myself; for instance, Golden Pearls, back in the days of Vanilla WOW I needed two for the Mooncloth Robe which was the best crafting robe for healing at the time, it required two Golden Pearls which retailed at 80-120g each, so I wouldn't be getting much change from 250g, 250g was a massive amount back then, so of I went to grind, it took about two hours of killing things but I got there, I'd have made about 50-80g in 2 hours of grinding so it made sense to go for the pearls. Now the duckers and divers amongst you will be asking why I didn't simply grind Golden Pearls to make money at 1 pearly an hour it'd average in the region of 100g an hour profit rather than 30 ish, well simple really, these pearls were quite rare, but also quite specialist at the time, they weren't used in too many recipes, so should anyone grind them on mass the bottom of the market would quickly fall out, and by the time I came to need the third pearl, it had. Someone had obviously been grinding, there were loads in the AH, the best price was in the region of 50g which meant it was far more advantageous to simply click buy than go spend hours grinding.

Since coming back to WOW, I've used the AH occasionally for bits and bobs, gold is quite easy to come by these days, so the occasional glyph or reagent, but again, never really selling. That was until this weekend; I've been levelling the druid over the past few weeks, while doing this I've skilled up both mining and herbing (this was my primary reason for levelling this character as I was sick of the flight form druid sweeping in, herbing, and flying off as I'm still stood there trying to dismount and wondering where the hell my herb went) on the way I've banked all of the materials (and the cloth too) gathered rather than selling it. The druid is now in the mid 60's which mean, with the stash of higher level herbs I had on my mage from his herbing, I could pretty much level inscription from 0 to 525 in one shot, there were occasions where I was a few herbs short so a swift trip to the AH filled the gaps, whilst I was being rinsed of my gold for these stacks of low level herbs, I noticed something; how much money there was to be made on the AH these days. As a result of levelling inscription I had loads of glyphs, cards and scrolls, on my server glyphs go for anything between 20-200g 20 for the crap stuff which no one but the people who must have every possible glyph for their class, around 50g for the useful but optional ones, and anything from 100-200g for the 'must have' glyphs. This is a huge amount, and probably a reflection of the 30-50g price for most stacks of herbs (other than the top level ones which are just silly prices). I decided I'd have a punt with some of the glyphs, it seemed a waste to just vendor them, so I stuck about 15 of the hundred or so I had on the AH, choosing the ones which were going for more than 80g, and just slightly undercut the best prices on there. To my surprise I sold 5-6 of them which more than covered the cost of the materials I'd had to buy to fill gaps as I levelled. Smelling a profit, I put another 20 or so on, and got thoroughly hacked off with the amount of time it took to check the prices, and create the auction. It was only a minute or so per auction, if that, but it soon mounted up. Yesterday I decided to do something about it, I decided to have a read up on the addons available for auctions, I'd previously used Auctioneer a little bit, but as I'd never really got into auctions, I'd never really tested it fully, I headed over to the developers page and to my disappointment it hadn't been updated since last October. Undeterred I had a look through wowinterface.com and curse.com, picking the addon which had been downloaded by a good number of people and received some pretty good reviews, this was Auctionator. I can now instantly drag items into the interface giving me a breakdown of the current competing auctions, automatically selecting the best price, and even offering the ability to buyout some of the sillier priced items (I spotted a Glyph of Obliterate on there for 8g, which I instantly relisted for 99g and sold 10 minutes late!). My early success encouraged me to stop slacking on the enchanting front, utilising some of the vellums I'd created for levelling (the mage is also my enchanter) I knocked out a few enchants to the level, to my surprise they sold too! All in all, with no more than an hour spent this weekend (including a good 20 minutes researching and installing the addon), I reckon I've made in the region of 1500g, now this is a bit of a false figure as I already had all of the mats for the items which I sold, but even so, if I was grinding mats purely to sell in the AH there's good money to be had.