The website www.wowecon.com is a really neat site for gathering price information, and can be used to find good deals to buy and resell. I just discovered it today, and have yet to install it or test it (particularly how it interfaces with Auctioneer), but I know others that use it successfully. I wanted to get this information into your hands quickly, but be cautioned that it hasn’t gotten my total seal of approval yet until I can verify it first-hand. Anyway, with that disclaimer out of the way, if you go to the site and read about what it does, it’s pretty impressive. Several things stand out to me:

1. It’s a great stand-alone site for looking up items to find their prices.
2. It’s got a free User Interface (UI) that does some very powerful things for you, in addition to the tooltips displaying useful price information in-game.
3. It provides information on what an item is worth when it’s disenchanted!
4. With the susbcription side (currently $3.33 per month), it will provide you with alerts for items that you are searching for (even emailed to you!) and many detailed graphs and features.
5. Most importantly, the price is based on auctions SOLD, not just the list price, like Auctioneer. So if somebody decides to list the Sageblade for 1500g, and they keep relisting it, the median price on Auctioneer would be 1500g. But if no one buys it until they reduce the price to 600g, THEN wowecon will show the price of 600g.

As best I can tell, it searches the in-game mail messages for information on auctions, stores it, then uploads it to the central site when you log out. You can then ‘download’ updates every day. They will track the data by faction and by server, with a rolling average, so you don’t get stuck with old data.

Note: there are upsides and downsides. The upsides are that it is already giving the vendor prices for the new reward items. Many of the rewards from the quests in the Outlands aren’t things I’ll use, but I’ve seen as much as a 6g difference in the vendor prices from the same quest. With wowecon showing the vendor price when I mouse over the items, it allows me to choose which item I will take to sell. The other main upside is that as crazy as the market is right now so early into the Burning Crusade, Auctioneer prices tend to be a little inflated on new items. Wowecon only shows what someone has actually SOLD or PAID for, not just listed. The biggest downside is that you need other folks on your server to use it. Chances are they are there, and the more that use it, the better the info. Not a huge downside, but you could end up with no Server price for a particular item.

Note: some people worry about wowecon because it auto-launches WoW. That’s a method that some keyloggers use to capture your login information. To get around that, run the WoWEcon update, and after the data update is complete, it counts down to launching WoW. Just close the updater and open WoW from your normal executable or shortcut.

One final thought: WoWEcon.com is a MEMORY HOG! Disable it if you are having low FPS (frames per second). I have plenty of FPS and memory, but I still leave it off unless I’m in the AH and need to know values of things.