Go look at the equipment NPC vendors. 7500 for a 2* equipment peice. Bid 60% of that on any 2* equipment in the AH and you're sure to not be outbid.

That might seem like a good thing, but it's not. In the AH, a transaction only sinks 10% of the payment. In the bazaar, a transaction sinks the entire payment. Thus the more popular the AH is, the more inflation.

A dead easy way to fix this would be to have the vendor prices reflect AH prices. For each vendored item, make a log of each top bid in the last x days, then get the highest price that it sold for, removing outliers, by averaging the top 10-20%. Add a few percent to this final price for markup, and sell at the new price.

With that, an impatient player gets a fair price on a piece of equipment, rather than absolutely forced to use the AH to get a decent price.