Undermine Your Opponents

Many of you have maybe seen www.Theunderminejournal.com. It was featured in Warcraftecon.net, as well as Justmytwocopper.org For those who do not know, The Undermine Journal is a powerful tool that does hourly scans of an entire server's AH, and keeps the data for two weeks. So how can The Undermine Journal help you?

Find the Farmers

On the top of the page, you'll see here the 'Top Sellers' tab. This is one of my favorites. This has a few great uses that can help you get an edge over your competition.
First, This is a fantastic way to find out who is a big farmer on your server. The names listed on the top row are the people who posted the most auctions recently. You will frequently find farmers on the top. The good thing about this is, you can message them in the game, and work out a deal where they simply CoD mass items to your mailbox. Not only will this save you gold, but it will save you time, and inventory space as well (you can just let some of them sit in your mailbox if you have to). Also, the popular sellers will usually include mass glyph/gem sellers, which leads into the next topic.

Time Your Competition

What you see here is a time period of 8 days, and the posting patterns of a glyph poster on my server. What I can see from this graph is that he only posts (yes he, I know him personally) around 5-6pm. That means that if I post my auctions before then, I will be undercut (as you can see he posts about 200 glyphs sometimes). But if I wait until AFTER 6pm, I can undercut ALL of his glyphs, and make some serious gold. This is fantastic for gems, glyphs, flasks, etc. If you know you competition, you can search their name and see their auctions, or you can search an item in particular, and see who posts them. Either way The Undermine Journal gives you plenty of ways to seek and destroy the competition.

Determining Market Price

What you see here are two different graphs. The top graph shows the average market price over 2 weeks (keep in mind, this is the average of the lower 15% of auctions, so the market price listed is close to the cheapest an item is available for at any time). What is good about seeing this graph, is that you can double check your auctioneer data, which just gives a straight up average. The problem with that is that it takes into account auctions that are much higher than the cheapest items, which means they will not get bought. Auctioneer values tend to be too high, and causing you to overestimate profits when you don't know the price of a product that well.

For example, if I see Frozen Orbs for 20g a piece, I want to know if it is a good time to buy. my auctioneer tells me that the average price is 21g- that doesn't help me too much. Were there some times recently when I wasn't online when Frozen Orbs were much cheaper? By looking at the graph you can see (top graph) that the price frequently dropped under 15g. Now I know that I should wait for the price to drop to buy the orbs.
This can also work on the flip side- to figure out when to sell, and if you can sell at a higher price or not.

The bottom graph shows the number of auctions listed every hour. This can be helpful when you want to sell a lot of an item- you can see if there is a pattern of when there is a low supply of that item- some items you will see a lack of supply on Tuesdays: this could be your prime selling time. This can also work the opposite way, figuring out what time of week to buy an item: when there is a high supply.

Generally, this is a great tool to use when you are getting into a new market, or maybe you have taken a brake from the Auction House for a few weeks/months, and you aren't sure what price trends are like anymore. Do realize however that the site is still in Beta, and your server might not be on it- if that is the case, you can request to have your server added. And don't worry, they are adding servers quite often. There are also many other tools that may be of use to you, check it out for yourself, get used to the interface. Have fun, and happy bidding.