I’ve been taking it slow ingame this past week. Inspired by Og’s series on AH flipping and Tyson’s March to 1,000 Gold series, I’ve been fine tuning my own AH flipping skills.

This has been taking up most my playing time as I’m flipping on three servers. One server is mature and Horde, another is a year old and Alliance, and the third is low pop and both factions. I really wish Auctioneer would write their logs to separate files for each server and faction, or at least provide the option to do so. My log is giving me a warning after two weeks of scanning. I dumped the data for the Alliance server to help reduce the load. The economy on the Alliance server is either way whacked out or a lot of players are buying gold. But I figured I’d like to make most my money flipping vs. farming mats, so I started scanning the Alliance server again. I’ve made some interesting observations.

Observations of a newbie AH flipper

1. While flipping rares is more profitable, it’s riskier, they usually take longer to sell, and Auctioneer cannot always be trusted. Being sure to take note of how many times an item has been seen can mean the difference between a successful flip or taking a hit. With one exception. If the item is rare and has never been seen, it is probably very valuable. Look up its median AH price on Allakhazam and/or Wowhead to find out, then quickly grab it if it’s underpriced in your AH.
2. There are a lot of items people consistently use. Raw materials for both primary and secondary professions sell reliably. Although they don’t always produce the big numbers, flipping them produces a steady stream of income. I’ve learned to not look down on those smaller profit items because they bring in a bigger profit when sold in smaller stacks, not to mention they are pretty much guaranteed to sell.
3. Some server economies can just plain suck. Such is the case with my Alliance server. Things are consistently overpriced and I have a hard time selling just about anything. I’m not sure how to work with this one, but there has got to be a successful niche somewhere in the market.
4. The low pop servers are lucrative. I have new characters on this server and started with 5g on Alliance and 15g on Horde. My Alliance character now has about 40g, with a 100g item in auction (payed 7g for it). My Horde fella has been camping the Darkmoon Faire and spent 50g on stuff from the Exotic Goods vendors. I’ll definitely more than double that investment.
5. A single character for banking/AHing is truly needed. I’ve been scanning/flipping with characters collecting dust, but whom I intend to play at some point down the road. They already had banks/bags full of their own stuff and I haven’t stopped sending them things they can eventually use. After reading Tyson’s post about the importance of AH alts, I decided I’d be better off doing the same.

I haven’t made a buttload of money like Tyson. My style is more similar to Og’s. I much prefer running my scans, grabbing what I can, reposting and moving on to something else. I’m just not comfortable, nor am I patient, with person-to-person trade. Plus, I really don’t know the epic market. Knowing your market is critical. When you start flipping, wait until you have at least a full week of scans in your log and those “how many times seen” numbers are reliable. Be sure to use outside resources like Allakhazam or Wowhead for price checks when you are unsure.