The only two TSM operations you will ever need (Patreon)

You can get by really well with just two basic auctioning operations that will literally cover 90% of your AH activities. One for flipping, and one for crafted items.

Keep it simple

You do not really need any fancy settings to post things profitably. As long as you are posting your items for sale for more than you paid for them you are good. in 95% of cases you will be posting at the current AH price and just undercutting someone else. So as long as you dont post at unprofitable levels you will do well!

The basic crafted item operation

This operation is as simple as it comes. We take advantage of the price source crafting that is equal to the sum of the materials required to craft an item. It will use the market value of materials by default, and you have to know the recipe for it to be valid.

I like to just use the crafting cost as I don't care too much about the market value as long as I am making gold relative to what I spent. I set my minimum price to 20% more than the crafting cost, and then the normal price to 2x crafting cost and the maximum price to 5 times crafting cost.

I have been using this basic setup since Legion and it still works really well.

Things to change

The only important thing to change for different items is the quantity. For gear I post a max of one, but for consumables it makes sense to post more than that. How much more depends on the item. In some markets it can also make sense to reduce the minimum price to 115% crafting, this is mostly relevant for consumables and other fast moving items with low deposit costs.

The basic flipping operation

For flipping you want to make sure you sell your item for more than you bought it. You can do this using the price source avgbuy, which is your average purchase price. You don't want to just use avgbuy though, as that would lead to you selling items for much less than you can get for them if you bought it incredibly cheap.

To get around this we use a max formula to set the minimum price at the highest of 115-130% avgbuy and some percentage of the market value. I like setting it fairly low to ensure I post stuff if it can be profitably posted.

The normal and maximum prices can be set to just 2 and 5 times the minimum price which is a distribution i find works reasonably well. In most markets the min price is the only thing that matters

Changing quantity

You can use these same pricing settings equally well for flipping BoEs and transmog as for materials. You do want to ensure you set the quantity differently though. A material flipping operation may have as much as 5000 as the post cap, but for gear you would only post one.

Shopping for deals

It's not as easy to make a fool proof shopping operation for flipping as the market distribution matters and TSM can't see it. If you want one I would suggest buying below 70% dbmarket. Then you can use the operation here to post and you will usually do quite well.

Adapt them slightly for other markets

With these basic settings you can quickly setup new operations with the right quantity and auction duration. 90% of my auctions are posted with some variation of these two basic operations and they work really well. You can go more fancy, but you don't really have to unless you want to.