The same folks that make Auctioneer also make an addon called Bottom Scanner. You can download it at http://www.auctioneeraddon.com/dl/BottomScanner/. Basically this is a real-time program that will search the AH every few seconds for new listings. You set the criteria for auctions you would deem profitable and it alerts you when an auction is posted that meets your criteria. You really should have the Auctioneer addon first and have a week’s worth of scans under your belt for it to establish the prices properly.

Because it requires that you sit at the AH to run, it is only useful in certain situations. Here’s how I use it: At times when I’m around the house, but NOT playing WoW or on the computer, I’ll login, talk to an Auctioneer and activate Bottom Scanner. I turn the volume up very loud, and walk away. When an item is listed that meets my profitability criteria (meaning it’s cheap enough that if I buy it and resell it I will make a decent profit), it pops up a window asking if I want to buy the item, and makes a ‘ding-dong’ doorbell sound. It’s rather pleasant, actually. So, I’m in the other room watching the Discovery Channel and ‘ding-dong’…the alert goes off. I hit Pause on my TiVo, jump to the other room, either buy or pass on the item, and go back to my show. You get the idea. The good thing about it is that you are very likely to find the good deals and actually GET them, since you are checking for them in ‘real time’ (or at least every few seconds). The listings aren’t out there long enough for other people to snatch them up.

You will need to do some configuring for Bottom Scanner once you download it. Use /btm help for a list of commands, and then use those commands to configure things like how much profit is the minimum you are willing to make, what percentage profit do you require, what price limit do you want, etc. The most complicated thing to configure is the calculation to determine the median price, called the ‘Base Rule’. Bottom Scanner comes loaded with default values from cross-realm medians. I don’t like that, since I’m on an older, well-established server where the median prices tend to be lower than most realms. I want it to use my Auctioneer scan data. I went to this page: http://norganna.org/wiki/BottomScanner/BaseRule and used the biggest rule displayed on that page. All you have to do is select the code that’s in the gray box (I recommend you read the article to understand it), copy it, and then in WoW use the /btm baserule command. It will open a dialogue box, and you can paste the lua code into it and close. It will then use your Auctioneer scan data by default. For more information about Bottom Scanner, visit http://norganna.org/wiki/BottomScanner.