Undoubtedly, the biggest news about Diablo III prior to launching was the inclusion of a second auction house that would use real money instead of gold to purchase some of the best items found in the game. This might sound like an easy way to quickly get some cash in your pocket if you’ve been playing for awhile; stockpiling some crafting mats, nice rares and Legendaries, but there are some things to take into consideration beforehand.
This short article will give you an idea of the fees you can expect to pay, along with a couple of quick tips to make selling on the RMAH a profitable and worthwhile endeavor.
Diablo 3 RMAH Quick Tips
Some notes on fees
Much like its gold counterpart, the RMAH (i.e., real money auction house) allows you to post some highly coveted items, but with a hard limit of $250 per item. In addition, Blizzard will take a 15 percent cut of the profits if you use PayPal, which means the most you can make on an item is $212.50, depending on the state you live in.
Some states expressly mention digital goods as taxable sales, meaning that you’ll also pay the sales tax on that item; for example, that would be another 7.25 percent off the item for California residents. Regardless of your method of payment, Blizzard will take another dollar for successfully selling an item.
Basically, this translates to the fact that you need to be somewhat picky about what you post and what you can expect to earn for your time spent farming items. For example, if you were to sell some boots for $2 and transferred the balance using PayPal, you’ll only get 85 cents for your time spent. Unless you happened upon these boots after grabbing something else that sells for $250, then it’s worth neither the time nor the effort.
Selling equipment vs commodities
Commodities also have another 15 percent removed on top of this regardless of which system you use to withdraw money, so if you were to sell $2 of essence, that would suddenly become about 73 cents. Naturally, higher priced commodities would have more significant deductions.
Depending on how long you play and farm to make money selling items, you might find the best thing to do is stick to just selling equipment rather than commodities to avoid the mandatory 15 percent deduction. Whenever possible, check existing auctions to see what the average price is for the equipment you’re selling; if other auctions exist, you might try to undercut the minimum by a dollar. If another auction doesn’t exist, set the market! Aim for the full $250, but don’t be surprised if another auction comes along and undercuts you.
Making money on the real money auction house is all about patience and trial and error.
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