The Auction House Bait

   Have you ever been in a place where you wanted to buy a certain gem or a glyph on the AH after getting that shiny new piece of gear but when you got to the AH you saw that the price of that item be it a gem or enchanting scroll or even a glyph is so high that made you puke a little bit inside your mouth.

   Well it doesn't even have to be that you need that item for yourself, it just might be that you are selling that particular item as well but you want to drive down the competition a bit and make them basically give you the item for a dirt cheap price where afterwards you go back repost it back on the AH and get all the profits, well this process is what i like to call AH Baiting and i will explain why the name.

   You see the image here i kinda stumbled upon it by accident but i'll be damn it depicts exactly what this strategy is all about, you will Bait and then Tackle the opposition down from the market.

   First thing you need to understand before you start is that 90% of the people that are posting and reposting all those auctions use some kind of a addon to post their auctions be it Auctioneer or TSM but what they don't really do is they almost never check for the lowest post and they simply click away and post their load and this is where you jump in and i will go in details about this as to how it looks like.

   One thing worth mentioning would probably be that this strategy works best for items that are in high demand like gems, flasks, pots, beltbuckles and even glyphs, and the best times for doing this is during peek hours like between 7pm - 1am, and the reason as to why this is the case is because there's most people that are buying and selling their auctions that period of the day, hence your best time to try and catch those big fish.

      As the example for this i have taken the screen shot from the TSM addon where its showing the information about the purple Retaliating Demonseye. If you take a quick peek at the information there you'll see that everything under that red line is prices around 175g per gem with give or take a few silver pieces, now with the introduction of the actual bait which in this instance is a single gem posted at 45g (this is a price that you can set to be as low as you feel like you want to go) you can see that there have already been someone that has undercut my bait with 4 gems with the standard undercut.

   As it is in this example you would probably go like, pff it's just a stupid Demonseye gem, nothing exotic. Well i'll try and get a screenshot of the new big undercut i do with the Red Inferno Rubies. For an example few nights ago i did this same thing like with the Demonseye but instead of it i went for the Brilliant Inferno Rubies, and on my server their moving price is somewhere between 80-250g depending on the day, well that night their current price was hovering at 120g and i was kinda running low on the red raw gems so i decided to try out my angling skills and try and bait out some cheap gems, and boy did it work. I posted 3 Brilliant gems at 35g each and like 3 minutes later i had 3 guys undercut me where one was undercutting me with 10 gems the other one with 7 and the third one had 25 gems up there, and all of them were at less then 35g. Needless to say i bought them all out and then cleaned house on the remaining 10ish gems on the AH and reset the price back to 250g. That night i sold them all at prices ranging 220-250g (the guys i undercut didn't stay away totally so they came back for round two so i had to battle it out with them on the AH but they lost their 250g worth gems for 30g previously). So there i was i got 40ish gems with them being pure profit ranging from 100-200g by not doing anything special, hell you dont even have to be a jewelcrafter to take advantage of this strategy.

   This doesn't stop at gems but like i said you can do this with beltbuckets, pots, flasks hell with all the high demand items to be honest, and pretty much anything that anyone would put in their posting addon.

   Just so you are aware, once you put down your baits know there's a good chance that someone might simply buy out your item be it a legit buyer or even a camper that knows his stuff (but those are not something you see alot) so it's pretty much like fishing, you need to throw a small fish to catch the big fish, or if you throw the big fish you might catch Moby Freaking Dick but if you get too greedy you might end up with just Moby's last name, if you catch my drift.

   So there we are, if you fancy yourself a good AH angler or simply want to try out the baiting then get your fishing pole and get to it, and like always keep an eye out for good opportunities out there.