Splitting Stacks To Save Time And Earn More Gold From Your Auctions

By: Martin Malmberg
Last updated: 2007-02-01

Here’s one way to earn gold all by itself, but it will also improve your earnings from grinding, gathering and crafting… in short, everything that involves selling on the Auction House. By using the two mods I recommend you’ll greatly facilitate the process.

What you do is you sell smaller stacks. Even single items.

The reason is simple: Let the buyers decide for themselves how much they want to buy. No one cares if you happen to have a stack of 7 mote of mana and it’s convenient for you to dump it on the AH in one stack. If they only want 1 or 2 they won’t buy from you.

But how can it save time to split up stacks? Everyone knows it’s very tedious and that’s why people avoid it.

It IS tedious, UNLESS you use Auctioneer. It’s a must-have mod if you want to make serious gold in World of Warcraft. Grab it from http://www.auctioneeraddon.com/

Now, all you have to do is put your stack of 7 items in the slot on the "Post Auctions" tab, input the price per item, and specifiy 1 item x 7 stacks and it will do all the work from you.

However, you will notice that your inbox will be flooded by mail containing expired auctions and money from successful ones. To grab the items and gold, use CT_MailMod available from http://www.ctmod.net/ which lets you open selected mails (you get a checkbox next to each letter), and also massmail which is a really neat feature allowing you to alt+left click items that go into a 21 slot inventory that you can send to the same recipient. It will mail each item separately and automatically. This saves a lot of time when mailing to your AH alt.

Once you have those mods installed, you can start splitting up stacks for greater profits. Here are some examples:

If you are selling potions and everyone else is selling stacks of 5 for 10 g, you can single-sell your potions for more than 2 g. Those who only want one or two potions will pay the extra premium to avoid having to buy a stack of 5. I’ve done this a lot.
Break reputation items down into smaller stacks. Few people will buy 173 Encrypted Twilight Texts or 250 bone fragments, but if you sell them in stacks of 10 you will have a greater market.
Look in the trade channel for people dumping huge loads of items at bargain prices, then split them up a few at a time and sell them for the normal price.
Look on the AH for opportunities to buy large stacks from people who are too lazy to split it up (and don’t use auctioneer), then do their job and reap the rewards.
Here’s one example of the above that I did today: Buying 7 Arcane Dust for 6 g and single-selling them for 1.85 g each. Not only did I buy them cheap (with the help of auctioneer), but I had much greater success selling them individually than if I had put the stack of 7 on the AH again for a higher price.
Always consider what size of a purchase people are willing to make for each item. Do they want to buy stacks (like runecloth) or just one (like one of the Stranglethorn pages)? Resize your stacks accordingly.
You can also use Auctioneer to sell multiple full stacks with one click.
All this will improve your earnings and can be a great money maker in and of itself, and it will also save A LOT of time that you can use to earn even more gold.
If you want proof that this works, split up some stacks and see how often people will buy a single item from you. If they had needed more of the same item they would have bought it at that price, but they didn’t. If you had offered them an entire stack, they would probably not have taken it.
Finally, don’t flood the market! Just because it’s very easy to place a large amount of auctions of an item doesn’t mean you should do it. Put up just a few at a time, to keep the supply limited, or you will drive the price down.

I’ve done all of the above, and it works well. Just don’t start buying huge stacks before you learn the market or you may end up with some goods that is hard to move.

Good luck.

Martin Malmberg

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