How to Find things to bid on
Well, you can do 2 things that I do. You can search the auction genie for items you think might be underpriced, like paint brushes, battle equipment, scratchcards, etc. You are looking to see if you can do a nmasami's early win method. If not, just place the minimum bid, so it will be in your "my bids". That way, whenever you log on, you can always see if a big auction is coming up.
The second thing is simple too, just watch the auctions board. You scan the 1-20 (not recommended, you won't have time to bid unless the auction board is slow, then 1-20 might not be bad). It depends on the time of day, the more people on, the more time you need, so I might do 41-60 sometimes, the 61-80 sometimes. The higher the number, the more time you have to search prices to see if it's worth it. However, the higher the number, the longer you have to wait.
If I find a good one, I'll right click on it, and "Open in New Window" and count down in my head till there's about 15-20 seconds left in that particular auction. Then I'll alt-tab and watch it, and try to make a winning bid. From experience, I know that most winning bids are made in the last 4 seconds.
You could just bid a newbie bid, if that's the highest you're willing to pay, then go back to scanning the board. If that's not the highest, you can open the new window and count down in your head. You can have half a dozen windows open, so this is where alt-tab comes in super handy.
You can alt-tab back to the main auction board, and find good deals, while all the while remembering about the previous deals. If you have a huge potential profit for one particular auction, I'll forget about everything else, and just watch the auction go down from like a minute.
Why would you wait a whole minute just for one auction, even if it's a big one? Cause you want to watch to see how vigorously people are bidding up the big one. If no one is bidding, that tells you how to bid. If people are bidding it up like mad, that will tell you how to bid.
It's one thing to see it jump up 15,000 points in a minute. It's something else to see not only how much people are outbidding each other, but how fast. If they are instantly outbidding, then that tells you during the last few seconds, the bid is going to be higher (cause those people will bid). If they take like 10-15 seconds, then there might only be a couple high bids to beat.
You can also tell the types of bidding, like just newbie bids, or are they going 2,000 over the limit. I'd rather know all of this ahead of time, rather than looking at the board with 10 seconds left and trying to figure out how much people are bidding and how fast.
One thing you can do if you don't know if it's a good deal when scanning the board is have another window, or ctrl - N and open a new window, and go to the shop wizard to lookup the price. This is assuming you have enough time to do so. Sometimes, you can just guess, like if people are bidding it up, and I don't have time to look up the actual price, I'll just make an educated guess and bid.
I've bid on things that I didn't know the price, just because others wanted it so bad, so I figure it must be good. If lots of others are bidding it up, I'll bid, and if I win, I always made a profit. All those people can't be wrong that's why. I'm totally not recommending that you bid on things that you have no idea about the value . . . but just in case that happens, that's what to do. You can always bank your money if it wasn't worth it, but for me, it always was.
You will have your own favorites about what to bid on. My favorites are codestones, scratchcards, map pieces (treasure, spooky and secret laboratory), dubloons, nerkmids, paint brushes, and other various things. Most things in the board are crap, stupid newbie items like omlettes or bottles of sand, so you just have to be patient.
The reason I watch those particular items is that they are popular and easy to sell. They also are frequently under priced because newbies put them up for auction, not knowing the price cause they didn't buy them . . . they got them in a magical "Something has happened!" event. They put it up for 1 point or something, thinking people will bid it up to the market value. It won't happen, but them not knowing the price is great, cause their uncertainty is your financial gain.
One thing to look for is morphing potions. They are under priced a lot, and winning could means tens of thousands of points for you. If you see someone has bid on a morphing potion (the more the better, means they want it), whether it's at 1,000 or 70,000, search the shop wizard if you have time, I almost always guarantee you'll make money if you win it.
What do you do if you see two items that are cheap, but end about the same time? Look at the screenshot from above.
The crypt of chance scratchcard is under priced by a few hundred, but so is the bottled faerie. You could try to win both, but that takes speed that the even best of us don't have (usually). The ending time is 4 seconds apart. Do you think you will have time to bid, switch back, refresh to see the latest bid, then make your bid? Not likely.
So what do you do? My dad told me something once. That you should never be "penny-wise, but dollar-foolish". Basically, don't work hard for the small stuff, rather, you should focus on the big stuff. Here, the scratchcard has a potential profit of 200, but the faerie about 1,700. The profit on each will get smaller as more people bid, but what do you think I'm going to watch more carefully, the 200 potential profit or the 1,700 potential profit?
Anyway, you might want to open both of them up in a new window, and with about 10 seconds left, based on the last bids at 10 seconds, type in a bid. Don't hit enter yet. Then switch back and try to win the earlier one. Once you hit enter for the first one, don't even look to see if you won or not. Just switch back to the one ending later and with your bid (based on the last bid at 10 seconds) hit enter. You could end up winning both, or losing both.
You might not want to chance it, and just focus on one. This is true if one has tons of potential profits, and one has very little. If both are the same type (map pieces, codestones, etc.) then chances are that the people watching the boards will all go for the one with the higher profit potential. What you can do in this case is type in a low bid, maybe a Double the Minimum Increment Bid, or something low on the one without as much profit potential cause people aren't bidding on that one, they're focused on the one with more profit potential. You can still refresh and win the bigger one, but make sure you bid on the other one too, cause chances are a simple newbie bid could win it, since people are all focused on the one with a higher profit potential.
This only really works on items that are similar. If one is a codestone and one is a map piece, different people bid on those different items, so you have to use your normal bidding strategy to win both . . . I just hope you have enough time.
Finally, if you are just starting out (or even if you are an experienced player), the best way to find a good buy is to check if someone else has already bid. If no one else has bid on it with 30 seconds left, chances are it's not a good deal. This only applies to peak hours, cause during slow hours, sometimes there just aren't enough people that bid early. . . . everyone is saving their bid till the last few seconds. In that case, as we've discussed earlier, you probably want to do a double bid of some sort, since you have no idea who's watching.
Checking to see if someone else bid is mostly if it's during peak hours, where hundreds of items are zooming by every minute, and you can't be bothered searching the shop wizard to see which are good deals.
Just see if anyone else bid on it, and if someone did, they must think it's a good deal. You would probably think it's a good deal too, especially if more than one person has bid.