As a crafting middleman, you basically are supplying other crafters with what they need. You’re the dude making sure there are enchanting mats on the AH or the gal offering end results of annoying assemblies.

Your goal in this role is to basically turn raw mats and items into stuff people want to pay for.

For example, for enchanting, search for weapon or armor and sort by price. Buy anything under 1-5g, as a rule of thumb – the expansion the item sources from will affect value. Cataclysm breakdowns, for example, are more rare while nobody wants spirit dust from Pandaria. You can almost always disenchant the mats for a profit or snag some transmog to flip. You can do this with the base AH UI very quickly (TSM chugs too hard on my computer for searches as big as this).

(Side note: The next step to making this loop self sustainable is using your own production skill to produce the things to DE, eg making a bunch of bracers with a tailor to DE for dust. This is what’s known as a shuffle)

You can apply this same concept to ores: you’re taking one thing and crafting it to add value. Buy cheap ores, smelt them to sell more expensive bars.

With tailoring, you have stuff like enchanted frostweave, soulcloth, basically turning mats into more valuable mats. Leatherworking lets you upgrade hides. Enchanting + Shadowlands legendaries is a great example of this middle market.

Herb fragments, leather scraps, ore nuggets, shattering enchanting mats, etc can all work with this concept – you can often sell or use them, once transformed. Do the math – sometimes things sell for very inflated values.

Be aware that there is a limit to when the crafting middle market mats stops becoming profitable. For some things, people won’t pay a middleman for – they might make those mats themselves as part of the end goal of their crafting or the process to make it is so easy that it’s not worth your time.

Also learn which mats help boost this sort of crafter. For example, a bunch of frozen orbs cheap on the AH means you get to make a ton of different cloth. Someone dumping a ton of crystals means DE profit. Timewalking dungeons means X ore, cloth, elemental is super common atm. Etc.

In addition to making money, playing this role will teach you about the flow of mats from raw to crafted, which are very important concepts to understand if you want to tackle goldmaking on a larger scale.

This will not make you tons of gold, but it will make you consistent gold.