The Auction House in the First Week
The shelf opens with the realm on 4 November, and for a few days it behaves unlike it ever will again: almost no stock, almost no buyers, and a deposit charged on every attempt to sell. This is what that costs, what has been reported going wrong with listings, and when a vendor is simply the better customer.
The deposit is charged before anything sells
The auction house takes its cut before it pays anything out. Posting a lot removes a deposit from the purse at the moment the listing goes up, and that coin returns only if somebody buys. If the lot runs its full duration unsold, the deposit stays with the house and the goods come back by mail. That order of events is the whole reason the opening week feels expensive: a character with a full bag of raw materials and very little coin can run the purse down by posting, before a single stack has found a buyer.
The charge is worked out from the vendor value of the item and the duration chosen, not from the price asked. Listing a stack at an ambitious price costs exactly the same as listing it cheap, which is why what a deposit returns matters more to a thin purse than the number in the price field. Longer durations cost proportionally more, and in a week where prices move between evenings, the long duration is often paying to keep a stale price on the shelf.
The floor under that charge is not a constant. On the beta the minimum deposit was raised in one build and lowered again in a later one, so a routine built on posting many cheap lots was worth more or less depending on which client was live. Before flooding the shelf with low-value stacks, it is worth checking the minimum charged per lot against the build that is actually running rather than against what worked in testing.
Listings that do not go through
The second cost is the one nobody budgets for: a posting that does not take. Beta reports describe the confirm step failing in several ways. The lot does not appear in the seller's own auctions tab, the window needs a reload before the shelf updates, or the stack sits in the bag as though nothing was pressed. We have not seen a fix note that closes all of those cases, and we cannot tell how often they happen outside the threads, so the sensible approach is to assume they are still possible and plan around them.
The practical risk is paying twice. If the first attempt quietly went through and the seller presses post again, two lots exist, two deposits are gone, and only one of them can sell at the front of the list. Checking the auctions tab before re-posting anything costs a few seconds and covers the whole class of problem. The same habit helps around hours when the shelf is unavailable, when actions queue up and land out of order.
Part of this sits in the interface rather than on the server. Stack splitting, the price-per-item field and the duration selector all behave differently from the modern client that most returning players last used, and the posting window and its fields is where the expensive mistakes are made: a price entered per stack instead of per unit is not a bug, but it costs the same as one.
Shelf or vendor during the opening days
In a normal week the rule is simple: anything with a buyer goes to auction, everything else goes to a vendor. In the first days the rule bends, because the buyer side is thin. Most of the realm is still in the early level brackets, nobody is stocking for raids, and an item that would be an easy sale a month later sits through its full duration untouched. Every unsold lot costs the deposit, the mail trip and the shelf space in a bag that was already short.
The goods that do move early are the ones a levelling character cannot avoid buying, and the ones a crafter needs in volume to pass a skill wall. Everything else is a candidate for the shop counter, where what a vendor pays per item is at least known in advance. The question is not which price is higher in theory but which one is actually collected this week.
- Grey drops and most quest leftovers: vendor, without thinking about it.
- Low-rank gathered materials in small amounts: vendor if the stack will not fill, list if it will.
- Early crafted gear with a narrow armour type: vendor unless somebody has already asked for it.
- Bags, bandages and bracket-appropriate reagents: list, these have buyers from the first evening.
Undercutting makes the same call harder than it looks. A lot that is undercut twice before it expires has to be cancelled and reposted to stay visible, and repricing a lot after undercuts is charged again each time. For thin-margin stacks, two reposts can cost more than the difference between the auction price and the counter the vendor was offering all along.
What we cannot tell you yet
There is no published formula note for the deposit changes seen between beta builds, only the behaviour players observed, so we cannot say whether the current floor is final or another pass is planned. We also have no confirmation from Blizzard on the failed-posting reports, no count of how many sellers hit them, and no list of which client versions were affected. Anything written here about frequency would be a guess dressed as data, and we would rather leave the gap visible.
The other unknown is demand. Nobody has realm-level listing counts for the first days, so the question of which goods clear and which sit is answered by watching your own lots expire, not by a table. Wider context for that is in our read on a realm trading with no stock, which covers why early prices say more about the number of sellers than about what anything is worth.
Questions
Is the deposit returned when the item sells?
Yes. The deposit comes back together with the payment once a buyer takes the lot. It is kept by the house if the listing runs its full duration unsold, and cancelling a lot early also forfeits it, which is why repeated repricing is more expensive than it first appears.
Does asking a higher price cost more to post?
No. The deposit is calculated from the vendor value of the item and the duration selected, not from the price you set. Pricing optimistically costs nothing extra at the posting step, though a lot that sits unsold still loses the deposit when it expires.
My listing did not appear. Should I post it again?
Check your own auctions tab first. Reports from the beta include cases where the lot went through but the shelf did not refresh, and posting a second time in that situation means two deposits gone for one sale. If the stack is still in the bag and the tab is empty, it is safe to try again.
Is it better to vendor materials during the first week?
Often yes, for small or partial stacks of low-rank goods. The buyer side of the shelf is thin in the opening days, so a lot that would sell quickly later can expire unsold and cost the deposit. Keep auction space for goods levelling characters and crafters are already asking for.
Sources
- Official patch and hotfix notes, where vendor and deposit values are changed without market warning — Blizzard news and hotfix notes.
- Player bug reports describing posting and interface failures during testing — Blizzard bug report forum.