Auction House Play styles

Let’s talk about play styles.  There are several ways to play the auction house, and many styles will overlap depending on the market.  

Auction House PVP-er:  This player is thrilled by the challenge of dominating a market within the game.  They are the ones who typically add their competition to their friends lists to keep an eye on them.  They are also the individuals who camp the auction house posting, canceling and undercutting their competition to keep control of a market.  

Commodities trader:  This player provides large amounts of raw materials.  They get their stock either by farming or by buying it directly from characters who farm but don't want the trouble of putting items on the auction house.  I image these are the players who put on some music and fly circles around various zones gathering up materials to later sell on the auction house.  Thankfully someone does this as I am a big customer.  

Craft marketeer: This player has characters that make finished goods and sells those on the auction house to other characters.  The typical market is to sell whatever the new hotness is.  They also may play in other markets such as making gear and consumables for leveling characters.  Or providing gear for twinked out low level PVP characters.  A subset of both those markets is enchants for BOA gear, which is extremely useful for both leveling characters and dominating the twink brackets.  Another big market here is the the containers market.  Every realm I have seen has an insatiable need for bags.  

Speculative retailer:  It is my opinion that this group is the most common of the auction house players.   As it requires the least amount of preparation, addons, etc.  I would break this group into a few subsets.  There are those who search the auction house for under priced items and repost them at a higher price.  This is referred to as “flipping”.  There are others who post items that they receive while playing the game, either world drops, zone drops, bind on equip gear from dungeons and raids, or BOE items purchased by Valor or justice points.  While this group isn't as “hardcore” as the ones above, they are the most prevalent and they often set prices for various products across the economy.  

Transmogrification marketeer:  This last group is one of those subsets of the speculative retailers, but they focus exclusively on transmogrification gear.  The selling of gear for transmogrification is a bit of a recent phenomenon brought on by two things: 1.  Blizzard introduced the ability to transmogrify gear to look like other gear into the game.  2.  an individual going by the name of Keelhaul showed the gold making community that he was able to make one million gold via transmogrification shortly after it was introduced, he also subsequently gave this gold away in staged fashion contests on various servers.