Recomend an auction house plugin?Follow

You will probably hear the addon "Auctioneer" recommended. In reality, I've found it isn't that useful to me because it is overcomplicated, it's settings are difficult to locate and manipulate to desired outcomes, and it is actually pretty bad at communicating the simple message of "what is this item worth" to the player (it can add 10-15 lines of unimportant, distracting information to your tooltips).

What is especially bad is that Auctioneer's algorithms are very slow to adapt to market changes, and there is no way to tell it to "adapt now" without manually stretching it's concept of prices that are in the market range (using it's "outlier" module). If I wasn't paying attention to the market, I would have listed my Frost Lotus' for 9g instead of 18g when the market started to stabilize on my server. The market on Frost Lotus shifted on my server over a week ago and Auctioneer still hasn't figured it out.

Even though it has some severe feature bloat, and is generally downright poor at market valuations, the one thing I do like about Auctioneer is the Appraiser function. The Appraiser will let you select an inventory item, and it will list the identical items currently on the auction house. You can then put the item up for auction, and adjust stack sizes etc. You have to be careful with it however, as it defaults to using stale data and when you refresh the data you can accidentally post an item using the stale market price data.

I swear by Auctioneer. It turns disenchanting for profit into taking candy from babies.

I've used it through 3 'versions' now and while each time I've had to relearn some of it's basic tenants, it's been worthwhile. The latest vesion has been the most tricky to get the hang of, but the forum boards at their website (mentioned above) are well monitored by the devs and they are always willing to help explain or give alternative suggestions.

If you scan the AH regularly with Auctioneer, you will build up a database of prices that will let you know the average, median, and last sells of a particular item (it shows up in the item tooltip). The more scans you have the more accurate the prices.

I admit, I don't use most of the features. After I scan, I use Auctioneer to search the listings for items I can DE for profit and for items selling for less than vendor value (more than you'd think).

As to why Blizzard doesn't offer the basic functionality you desire, well, it's probably the same reason their calendar doesn't track profession cooldowns or their threat meter is, well, it isn't Omen.

I just wish I knew what that reason was.

Personally, I use Auction Lite, available on curse. It's bare bones compared to Auctioneer Suite, but I don't want all the fluff anyway. What it does well is scan the AH for current prices on your farms and then offers you a sell price thats probably gonna get your stuff bought. This works well for things that have a lot of listings, like cloth, leather, ore, metal. Things that you know there's a bunch of, and current market buyout prices are going to dictate the market anyway. Also run of the mill greens that I'm familiar with. I NEVER sell rarer drops, or drops I'm not familiar with without coming here and doing some research first, so I'm not looking to trust my add on to give me prices on those anyway. I've been burnt before, because it seems my servers prices are rock bottom compared to others, and trusting the add on w/ a price just gets my rare drops sold in minutes.