Utilizing Undermine Journal Browser Bookmarks

Welcome back old friend!

I was so glad when I heard that one of my favorite gold making tools, The Undermine Journal, was coming back on line. It had become a very useful tool before it went offline and I'm finding myself using it in more and more ways every day.

Today I'm going to be discussing how to use UMJ and web browser bookmarks as a fast and easy (although slightly less accurate) alternative to Blizzards's Mobile Auction House for keeping tabs on your own characters auctions.

Using this technique will allow you to do more in less time as you won't have to even log out of your current character.

The Setup
Setting up the bookmarks for each character will be out first order of business. I like to have one bookmark (which I keep on my bookmark bar for easy access) for each of the characters I regularly use for auctioning.


We start by heading to The Undermine Journal (UMJ) and finding the faction/server our character is on. (For this guide I will be choosing faction/server/seller at random. I apologize if, by some miracle, it's your character. lol)

UMJ Item/Seller Seach

Here I have chosen the Horde side of the Alleria server. We are now going to search for our character by using the search box as shown here (red highlight is mine).

 I put in the seller name and hit search. (In this example I searched for the character "Abitim".) This search will bring up the seller page for this specific character on this specific server/faction.

Now let's assume this is the character I want to be able to keep tabs on. Perhaps he is our bank alt or perhaps our crafting alt. What ever the case we now have what we need, the URL to our character's auctions page on UMJ.

UMJ Character Page

We are going to want to bookmark this page with our web browser (example URL) and keep the bookmark in a handy spot so we can come back as often as we want to. (I use my bookmarks bar.)

Now that we have our first character there is a neat shortcut that will allow us to add more characters from the same faction/server very easily.

I've highlighted the URL in this screenshot to give us a better idea how UMJs URLs are set up. The character name is at the end of the URL.

UMJ Character URL

To see (and bookmark) the page for another character we simply have to replace their name in the URL in the address bar of our browser. (Note, the URL is case sensitive so you must capitalize the character name.)

Once the new URL has loaded you can then bookmark this URL as well. Repeat this with as many characters as needed. If you need to change the faction/server do so by replacing the H with an A (or vice-versa) or replacing the server name.

The Data
Now that we have our character's bookmarks set up and we are excited to become paragons of efficiency what use are they to us? The seller pages on UMJ provide a few key pieces of information as well as links to other pieces of powerful data.

By scrolling near the bottom of the page we can see perhaps the two most important sections: "Sold Items" and "Current Items". In between the top and the bottom are lots of other interesting charts and data but for me these two sections are where the meat of the data I want to know is.

Sold Items and Current Items

What we get with thse two sections is a rough idea of items that UMJ thinks we may have sold as well as well as items it thinks we have up for sale.

Why do I say UMJ "thinks"? Because of how UMJ works. From what I've read UMJ scrapes the AH of every realm about once an hour and provides that data on their site.

How do they know if something has sold? My guess is that if the item ended before the time it was posted for (12/24/48 hours) passes then UMJ assumes it was sold.

Is this always correct? I'd say not. I can think of a few reasons why auctions may end early (the main one being that you canceled the auction early possibly to sell or re-list). But all in all it should be somewhat accurate.

The nice thing about looking up your own characters is that you will know if you canceled an item and so if it shows as "Sold" and you canceled it you can guess it didn't sell. The useful bit comes when you see an item that you didn't cancel as "sold".

The Power
The power that this gives is that we now have a very easy way to "check in" on the auctions of our characters across multiple factions/server all without ever having to log out of the game.

Granted the data has a slight delay and obviously isn't as robust as something like the Remote Action House on WoW's website/mobile app but it is still very useful.

Item page. (Check who undercut you.)

The other powerful thing we get in this is ability to click on one of our current auctions and bring up a new page showing other auctions on our faction/server for that item.

Has one of your items not been selling? Maybe someone undercut you. How can you tell? Click your UMJ page and select the item. It will show anyone who may have posted to undercut you.

Wrap Up
Today I've gone over just one tool (and one small part of that tool) that I have found useful in helping me stay at the top of my game. We have  to remember that the more tools we have at our disposal, whether in-game or out, the better auctioneers we become.

I'm still learning UMJ and I hope to bring you more articles about this incredibly powerful tool in the future. (Be sure to spend lots of time clicking around on stuff in UMJ to discover more of what it has to offer.)

What are some of you favorite out-of-game gold making tools? In what ways do these tools help your day-to-day gold making efforts? I'd love to hear about them in the comments.