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Tradeskillmaster basics
🕑 Added 2025-03-20 08:06:05 +0000 UTCTradeSkillMaster is an incredibly powerful auction house addon and the centerpiece of any large scale goldmaking operation. Today I’ll show you the most important parts to get going.
Don’t worry, you don’t need all of it
TradeSkillMaster is a VERY comprehensive addon and it replaces all of your crafting and Auction House UIs and has an absolute ton of options. The good news is that you only need to use about 10% of it to get the vast majority of the benefit.
Groups and operations
The main part of TSM is groups and operations. Groups are groups of items that you want to treat the same way. Operations are the various rules you can make for how TSM will treat the items in a group. This includes rules for how many to post on the AH and in what price range, how many to craft if you do a restock and a bunch of other things.
Understanding groups
Groups can be grouped (haha) in any way you want. Groups can have sub groups where they share some operations with the main group and have some specific ones. In general there isn’t one right way to make your groups, but they should support the things you are crafting or flipping in the most efficient way. For instance for material flipping in classic I have sub groups for material types and then sub groups for each specific material. That way I can scan for the most relevant materials first and choose to only search for some herbs if I’m in a hurry and don’t want to bother with the lower value ones.
For a situation where sub groups with different rules could make sense we could look at crafting armor with blacksmithing. For old expansion transmog your auctioning rules would want to have a higher profit margin than for items that are currently relevant, but you may want to craft the same quantity so having the same crafting operation to restock 1 of each could make sense.
Operations, you only need 1
The most valuable operation type by far are auctioning operations. They set the rules for how many items to post, when to not post based on the current price and at what price range you want to post the item. Once you’ve set that up for a bunch of items you can post hundreds of auctions in a minute or two just by using the scrollwheel macro.
Auctioning operations have options for quantity (or number of stacks and size of stacks in classic). For armor and weapons it would be 1, for flasks or potions you would probably post a lot more at the time.
Pricing
Pricing can be done with hardcoded prices or with formulas that use the TSM pricing database. The latter is a lot better as it means your prices will always follow the market or your crafting cost without you needing to update it. The minimum price is the minimum price you want to post at, you need to make sure this is a price that guarantees you a profit. The normal price is what you will post at if nothing is on the AH, this is fairly rare so for many items it does not matter. Then you have the maximum price which is the maximum price you would post at. This makes sense as higher prices limit sale rates, so you may want to keep the price within reasonable limits to ensure someone wants to buy your auction. For prices above max and below minimum you can choose the behaviour between various options such as posting at minimum or maximum, not posting or posting at the normal price. For minimum I will either post at minimum if it is a fastselling item or not post if the deposit can be significant. For maximum I will usually post at the maximum price, but posting at normal can make sense if you set a high normal price.
The main formulas
The main pricing formula I use is the crafting price source. This is the sum of the cost of materials needed to craft an item (where the cost of materials is by default the market value in the TSM tooltip). A minimum of 120% crafting means you are getting at least 20% more than the materials cost. You may need to change material prices, particularly in retail if you are doing the entire supply chain. 80-90% of my auctioning operations for crafted items have 120% crafting as the minimum price.
dbmarket is the TSM market value and is the other main price source I use. I mainly use this for flipping as well as for determining the value of materials for the crafting price source. Material flipping in classic for instance buys materials at a maximum of 80% of the market value and reposts at a minimum of 100% market value. I know from experience that there is a lot of demand at 100% dbmarket, so this works really well.
Shopping operations
I pretty much only use shopping operations for flipping, where the main purpose is to set a maximum price you are willing to buy at so you can quickly evaluate if you should buy a given item. These days I pretty much only do material flipping in classic, as I don’t really enjoy multi realm flipping on retail (I also use a slightly different method for buying battle pets which you can learn about in the battle pet video linked in the description).
Tooltip
You can see a lot of useful information in the tooltip, including the prices I mentioned. I would suggest adding advanced crafting data and advanced destroying data so you can understand the computed crafting cost and also see the computed disenchant or prospect value. Looking at prices and sale rates you can get an idea of which items are worthwhile focusing on. Higher sale rate and higher price is generally more gold per hour.
Simple case study: crafted transmog
Let’s make a quick group for some crafted transmog. First I’ll go to my profession window and look for some recipes with a green profit number. Then I’ll craft two or three of these. Once I have the items I can make a new group called Transmog and add them to it like below.
The next step is to make an auctioning operation. Since the profit was really high on these items and transmog sells slowly I want a higher profit margin. I’ll set the minimum price to 150% crafting. I know that transmog can often sell for a LOT more than the crafting cost, so I’ll set the maximum price to 30crafting. For the normal price I want a high, but not excessive profit. I’ll set it to 5crafting. For quantity we only want one at the time so we set that to 1. Now you can go the auction House, open the auctioning pane and click your group. Then click run post scan. Once the scan is finished you can post auctions by using the TSM scrollwheel macro or clicking the post auction button.
The rest is for the specially interested
There’s a lot more going on under the hood, but generally you don’t really need to understand that unless you really enjoy it. If you are armed with some auctioning operations and some groups for crafted items that you can craft for a profit that is enough.
