What Posting at Auction Costs
Selling on the shelf is not free and the coin does not land the moment somebody clicks buy. Three mechanics decide whether a listing is worth making at all: the deposit you pay up front, the wait before proceeds reach your bags, and what it costs to pull a listing and put it back one copper lower.
The deposit is paid before anything sells
Every listing takes a deposit at the moment it is posted, and the coin leaves the purse whether or not a buyer ever appears. In the Classic line the charge scales with two things: the duration chosen for the listing and the base value of the item itself. A long listing of a bulky stack is the expensive case; a short listing of something cheap barely registers. If the item sells, the deposit comes back with the proceeds. If it expires unsold, the deposit stays with the house and the stock returns to you.
That is why the cheapest-looking posting decision, the longest duration on everything, is the one that quietly drains a seller who guesses demand wrong. The item value side of the charge is worth checking before a bulk post, because what a vendor pays per item is the figure the deposit is measured against rather than the price you are asking. The mechanics of the charge itself are broken down further in how auction deposits are calculated, and the short version is that duration is a cost, not a free option.
Proceeds arrive by mail, not into your bags
A completed sale does not credit the seller on the spot. The coin is sent by mail, and the mail does not appear the instant the buyer confirms. Unsold stock comes back the same way after the listing expires. For a casual seller this is a detail. For anyone running stock through the shelf in volume it is the single biggest constraint on the day, because working capital spends part of every cycle sitting in an inbox rather than in a purse, and nothing can be reposted until it is physically back in the bags.
The hold has knock-on effects beyond patience. A seller who plans to buy materials with the proceeds of a morning sale cannot assume the coin is available for the afternoon run, and a crafter who funds the next batch from the last one is working one cycle behind. Delivery timing for coin and goods is covered in the hold on mail and guild bank, and the wider sequence of posting, bidding and buyout sits in how listings and bids resolve.
Undercutting costs more than the price difference
Cancelling a live listing does not refund what you paid to make it. The stock comes back, the deposit does not, and posting it again at the lower price means paying a fresh deposit on top. So the true cost of shaving a listing is the old deposit, the new deposit and the mail wait before the item is even in hand again. Against a seller who posts once and leaves it, a seller who chases every undercut can spend more on deposits in an evening than the price gap was ever worth.
This is also why a price war on a low-value item runs out of steam faster than one on an expensive item: the deposit is a larger share of the margin. Sellers who treat the shelf as a rotation rather than a shop front plan around it, and buying low and reposting stock only works when the cycle cost is counted in. Where several sellers agree to stop shaving each other, the arrangement described in sellers holding a price floor is as much about deposits as about greed.
What we cannot tell you yet
We have no Forever-specific figures for any of this, and we are not going to borrow numbers from another realm line and present them as local. The exact deposit formula on Forever, whether duration bands are priced as they were in earlier Classic builds, and how long the mail hold runs have not been published by Blizzard and we have not seen a beta report that measures them cleanly. Several threads describe a wait before auction coin lands, which is consistent with the old behaviour, but description is not measurement.
Two further unknowns are worth flagging. We do not know whether cancelling behaves identically on Forever or whether the team adjusted it, and we do not know how the shelf behaves around maintenance, which matters for anyone holding listings overnight; the shape of that problem is set out in hours when the shelf is unavailable. Tooling may also change the arithmetic, since addons that scan listings decide how quickly a seller notices an undercut at all.
Questions
Do I get the deposit back if the item sells?
Yes. In the Classic line the deposit is returned together with the sale proceeds when a listing sells, and it is kept by the house when the listing expires unsold. That makes the deposit a charge on failed guesses about demand rather than a flat tax on selling, and it is the reason long durations on unproven goods are more expensive than they look.
Why has my gold not arrived after a sale?
Auction proceeds are delivered by mail rather than credited straight into your bags, so there is a gap between the buyer clicking and the coin being usable. Unsold stock returns the same way. We do not have a measured figure for how long that hold runs on Forever, only reports that describe a wait, so plan your next purchase on the assumption that last session's proceeds may not be in hand yet.
Is it worth cancelling a listing to undercut?
Only when the price gap is larger than two deposits plus the time the stock spends in the mail. Cancelling forfeits what you already paid, reposting charges again, and the item is not available to list until it comes back. On cheap goods the deposit is a large share of the margin, which is why undercut wars on low-value stacks burn out faster than on expensive items.
Does a shorter listing duration always save money?
It lowers the deposit, but it raises how often you repost, and every repost is another deposit plus another mail cycle if the previous one expired. Short durations suit goods you expect to move quickly; long durations suit items with few buyers where expiry is unlikely. The wrong pairing is what makes posting expensive, not the duration itself.
Sources
- Community reference for how Classic-era auction deposits, expiry and mail returns behave; not Forever-specific — Warcraft Wiki: Auction House.
- Blizzard support article on using the auction house and receiving proceeds by mail — Blizzard Support: Auction House.