Batch Posting, Time Saver, Gold Maker.

I wanted to go into detail about batch posting, but first I wanted to discuss slightly the path I have taken to finally understand and use batch posting effectively.

I think there are phases in the life of an auction house trader. The first phase is being a buyer. You don’t sell, buying things you need when you have enough gold from questing or dailies. At some point perhaps due to lack of gold, or frustration with grinding you decide to try earn your gold through the AH.


This starts phase two, which is when you start to actively participate within the auction house economy. Generally you would start with one or two items, trying to sell them. Perhaps they are crafted items or something you gathered, regardless you are a seller of a couple items, and eventually you track and understand these items well.

This phase is somewhat of a turning point. It allows you to realize the potential for gold by participating in the auction house, or you get frustrated and go back to phase one. Some people will never leave this phase, content to be worker bees and gather herbs and such. All economies need workers, after all the gold in our wow economy comes from people doing quests and grinding mobs. The auction house merely redistributes this gold. The auction house of itself is actually a gold destroying function of our virtual game. It creates no wealth, just wealthy players.

As time passes for those that find some success selling, they evolve to carry more and more items, and usually end up specializing in one area or a couple of limited ones. The main difference between this and the second phase is primarily quantity and activity. At this phase AH Traders are posting on a pretty much daily basis and sell 30-100 items a day. I would say that the average income for these people would be 100-500 gold a day for spending 30 minutes putting up auctions each day, and perhaps another hour or two for restocking goods once a week.

The problem that arises is how to breach the time barrier. This is the primary problem for making it to the final phase. As always in this blog I believe time is the most important thing. Sure you could make more gold off the auction house, but it would require more and more time spent in front of the auction house click on the post auction button in auctioneer, and more and more time researching those items you are carrying to make sure you are making a profit off them. More math, more time, and more spreadsheets. Time becomes the limiting factor in the amount you can make on the auction house.

There are dozens of ways to make gold off the auction house, but each way requires a certain amount of time. So then we ask ourselves how are people like Gevlon making 10,000 gold a week? Is he spending 10 hours a day staring at his auction house screen? The answer is no, it comes down to a revolutionary way of selling, a change in your mentality. It is called batch posting.

The problem with batch posting is that it posts all your auctions, If you posting 1000 items a day like Gevlon, it would take forever to check each item to make sure it was going to sell for an appropriate price before clicking on the batch post button. At that point what’s the point, I may as well just click post auctions when I check each auction anyway, I mean Auctioneer will queue the auctions anyway so why bother with batch posting?

The answer is really simple, Gevlon, and myself as well, we don’t check the auctions we are going to list. I post 400 auctions a day. I do a scan of the auction house than I push batch post. It takes less than two minutes of my time. I window out of WOW and read some blogs, and check back in 15-20 minutes later and turn off WOW. I repeat, I have no idea what my auctions are selling for. I don’t check, by this phase you should be intimately familiar with Auctioneer. If you have set up the configuration correctly it will sell your items for approximately for what you want it to. Here is the kicker, at this point you may even be losing gold on some of your auctions. There will be errors when you first start this method. Items that you forgot to click on a match function, or that auctioneer didn’t have correct data on and they sold for ridiculously low prices. Sometimes you will be losing because you did the math wrong. Some items will be posting for too much, other for too little, adjustments will be made, but this one little function is the key to wealth, more than anything else.

After the first few weeks you can do an assessment with auctioneers bean counter and find out whether an items is making you gold or not. Batch posting is not for the new AH Trader, ideally it for those people who have gotten to the point that they are selling literally hundreds of items every day, and have the gold to back up mistakes while they convert to this new way of thinking. Batch posting allows an AH Trader to breach the time problem. Batch posting has allowed me to enter into fourth phase. It has allowed me to make an average of 1000g a day, every day. This is the final phase, or at least this is as far as I have made it. Perhaps there is more beyond this, but I am still searching for that next level myself so obviously I can’t tell you about it.

Ultimately, Batch Posting will save you time, and when it comes down to it, that’s all that really matters.