What a Forever Auction Deposit Costs
Every lot on the shelf is paid for before a buyer looks at it. The charge is not taken from the asking price, it is worked out from the item and the duration, and it does not always come back. This is how that number is built, what happened to the minimum, and which seller habits quietly pay it twice.
Where the number comes from
The deposit is not a cut of what you ask. The auction frame works it out from what the item is worth to a vendor, then scales that by how long the lot is set to stay up. The asking price is not part of the sum at all: a stack listed at double the going rate is charged exactly what the same stack listed at half is charged. The coin is held rather than spent. A lot that sells returns it alongside the proceeds; a lot that runs out its duration unsold does not.
That leaves the seller two levers. One is the item, which is fixed, and what a vendor pays for it is the base the whole calculation is built on. The other is duration, which is a choice made in the posting frame each time. Short durations are cheap and force the decision again sooner; long durations cost more up front and let a slow item sit. On goods that move within an evening the difference is noise, and on crafted pieces with a narrow buyer list it is the largest single cost of selling.
Because the base is a vendor line rather than a market price, the entry fee to the shelf moves whenever that table is edited. The same hotfix that halves what a reagent sells for at a shop also halves what it costs to list, with no market signal in front of either change. That connection is worth holding on to when reading how gold enters and leaves a realm, because the vendor side is the one part of it that can be rewritten between two logins.
The 1 silver floor and the rollback to 1 copper
Forever shipped a build in which no listing could be deposited for less than 1 silver, whatever the item vendored for. On expensive goods nobody noticed. On raw materials, cheap greens and the low-rank reagents that gatherers post in volume, that floor was not a rounding adjustment, it was the entire cost of selling. A seller splitting a bag into many small stacks paid the floor once per stack, so the habit that usually gets the best price became the most expensive way to clear a bag.
A later build returned the minimum to 1 copper, which put the charge back in proportion to the item. We have not seen a note explaining which of the two was the intended value, so the useful reading is the one that survives either answer: the floor is a setting, not a constant. Anyone doing deposit math for a stack should treat the minimum as something to check in the posting frame rather than something to remember from last month.
The practical consequence is about stack size more than about trade. Volume sellers of cheap goods are the group a floor lands on, and they are also the group least able to absorb it, since the margin on a herb stack is thin to begin with. Sellers of single crafted items pay the floor once and barely register it. A change of one line in a config therefore moves the cost of selling for one half of the shelf and leaves the other half untouched.
Cancelling a lot burns what you paid
Pulling a listing returns the item and nothing else. The deposit stays where it went, and putting the same stack back up starts the charge again from zero. That is the rule most sellers meet by accident, because cancelling is the normal reflex after somebody posts underneath you. One cancel and one repost is two deposits on one stack, and a busy evening on a contested commodity can run that loop several times before anything sells.
This is why answering a cheaper listing is not free advice. Leaving a lot alone and waiting out the duration costs nothing further, and if the undercut is a single small stack the cheaper seller may clear out before your lot expires. Chasing every price move converts the deposit from a one-off entry fee into a recurring bill, and on goods with thin margins that bill can be larger than the gap you were trying to close.
The same logic argues for matching duration to how fast the item actually moves rather than always picking the longest option. Commodities that turn over in an hour do not need to sit out a long listing, and crafted goods with a handful of possible buyers rarely sell faster because they were posted for longer. Sellers working out the full cost of posting usually find duration choice, not the floor, is where most of their coin goes.
What we have not seen confirmed
We have no published table of what each duration multiplies the base by, so the only reliable way to compare two durations is to open the posting frame with the item in hand and read the figures it shows. We also have no note stating whether the return to a 1 copper minimum is final or an interim value while something else is reviewed. Treating it as provisional costs nothing; assuming it is permanent costs a seller who posts in volume.
Two further behaviours we cannot describe from a source. Whether every item class is deposited on the same rule, and whether anything is returned when an expired lot is collected from the mailbox rather than left there. Reports we have seen do not separate those cases cleanly, and we are not going to fill the gap with a number nobody published. Sellers who move large volumes of weekly restock goods are the ones best placed to notice if the behaviour differs.
Questions
Is the deposit based on the price I am asking?
No. It is worked out from what the item is worth to a vendor and from the duration you choose, so two identical stacks listed at very different prices are charged the same amount to post.
Do I get the deposit back?
If the lot sells, the held coin comes back with the proceeds. If it runs out its duration unsold, it does not. If you cancel the listing yourself, you get the item back but not the deposit, and reposting charges you again.
What was the 1 silver minimum about?
A Forever build set a flat floor of 1 silver per listing regardless of the item, which made posting many small stacks of cheap materials disproportionately expensive. A later build moved the minimum back to 1 copper.
Does a longer duration improve the odds of selling?
It gives the lot more time on the shelf, nothing else, and it costs more up front. For goods that turn over quickly the extra time is wasted, and for goods with very few possible buyers the extra time rarely changes the outcome.
Sources
- Blizzard's official news and hotfix feed, where vendor and auction changes are posted when they are posted at all — World of Warcraft news.