Auction House was long a mysterious place for me. Not until I hit 60s with my first char when I actually tried to use it. Before, I’ve never seen any sence.
See for yourself: I was completely satisfied with gear for my current level, as I leveled slowly and hitting every questline, I always had enough mats for my professions: cloths from humanoids and chanting dust from disenchanting multiple quest-rewards and crafted cloths, and even Cooking, as I developed Fishing too. So: why do I need an Auction actually? No buying need.
As a seller, I was never a grinding person, so I had no stacks of spare mats to sell, and occasional spare gear or mats were disenchanted or sold at once. I just saw no sence with going to a big city and spending my time first investigating the prices, then putting my occasional 2 pieces of meat to (maybe) receive 2 gold coins. I considered my professions as a way to improve my character and that’s all.
Also as I easily got everything I needed from the game, I thought about AH as of a place somehow cheaty. Like if people don’t want to play properly and choose an easy way.
Now everything has changed. I can’t tell exactly what was the first item that I ever bought at AH, but I guess it was the said meat. Then I understood that people pay for their laziness. You don’t want to fly across outland to grind few chunks of serpent flesh for your dailies, and you need plenty. As I always wanted my game to be fun, and grinding is never an option at WoW unless you need huge piles of smth., I chose AH.
BUYING STUFF
I’m not an excellent buyer of course. It’s my lack of patience which doesn’t allow me to wait few hours or days until people sell the mats cheaper – or until I simply get them from mobs while leveling (and I know I will). Leveling a profession is an extremely satisfying aspect of my gameplay, so when I’m happily going up and up to reach a cool recipe or an achievement profession point or crafting something complex and epic – I don’t want time or grinding to interfere. So I spent thousands of gold from my leveling chars on mats – that’s supposedly my main article of expenses. I frequently got to the point when my highest developed chars emptied ALL their bank accounts for lower chars. 10g for a route taxi – that’s all. Funny enough – professions did not bring me money, but REQUIRED the investments. So –
“Time is money, friend!”
Mogging – is not what I’m after, as I’ve discovered it very recently (like half a year) and I’m not a devoted mogger too – not running around the raids to get a nice thing. Mostly the cool mog stuff I usually get while questing/raiding and decide to keep it in my bank just in case. But I’ve bought a glowing ice sword for my mage after trying on ALL the swords in stocks (the one from SoO simply didn’t fit, an ugly dirty razor).
SELLING STUFF
I’ve started selling stuff with some mats of course, food and cloth cause I had spare. And then I was surprised that people actually WILL buy the things from me that they could get easily and for free from the world! The second discovery was that they WILL pay relatively big money for almost EVERY junk that passes through your hands. The third discovery was that you can actually sell most items within max 2 days allowed.
What really boosted my usage of AH is of course the option on the website. While in-game I better do a quest or dig archaelogy or level-up – i.e., better do something fun!, I can easily take few minutes of rest at my work and place items to sell. Besides, on the website you see at once which prices are actual without extra typing and searching, so I simply put the price 1-10 golds lower.
So far, I’m most successful at selling jewels as Microfury prepares 7-10 of them from one Halfhill farming daily, and once in 12 days – bags from Micromantica (it’s BANG! – 1800 gold at once). Almost all of my chars now are busy dressing up their fellows and providing stuff for them. But when I actually keep up to the actual content and my chars will follow the Draenor content altogether, I think I will put AH in full use. Need money for Alliance chopper!
So: although you may never become as skilled as a goblin (even Schlitzchen) – AH is a blessing, just learn to use it.
Gnomecore 
That’s pretty much the way I use the AH too; a huge gem dump and professions. But it took me a long time to get to the point of casually buying stuff off it.
Since the beginning of my WoW career, I’ve always been thrifty. I’ll run instead of take a flight path, avoid death to keep repair costs down, farm all my mats (even the obscure ones), pretty much any way I could keep the coins. This was probably due to the fact that it was really hard to get gold back in BC, but I digress. So, I never bought anything on the AH. I would sell occasionally, but never buy.
Eventually, as time wore on, I began to finally buy stuff, some leather for tailoring here, some essences for enchanting there. But then, and even now, I mostly farm all my profession mats (except cobalt ore, screw cobalt ore!).
I can’t even begin to comprehend the people who buy stuff to resell, and monitor waiting for the very best deals…. That seems like crazy sauce to me, but I guess its almost like a mini Supply and Demand game in itself. But I totally agree, the AH for however you use it is one of the most valuable resources in WoW!
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If you watched web-series “The Guild” from Felicia Day, you probably saw an episode when an obsessed guild leader suddenly discovered that his guildmate’s Indian mother (not a gamer at all) appeared to have extremely great economy skills by nature. So he almost tied her with chains to a laptop and together they merely crushed all the market on server with selling and reselling :) That was so absurd that I laughed like hell.
IRL, any financial and account papers just drive me crazy from reading the first 2 lines, so that’s not what I want to do in-game either.
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Not good – I buy stuff to flip and end up keeping it for myself. Same IRL!
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