Setting price alerts that do not spam you

The ten kinds

• Minimum buyout or median at or below a price. The buying alert: fire when I can get it for this much.
• Minimum buyout or median at or above a price. The selling alert: fire when it is worth listing what I have.
• Median a percent under its 30 day median. The relative alert: fire when this is cheap for this item, whatever the number. Best for items whose price you do not know by heart.
• Fewer than N units listed. The supply alert: fire when the market is thin enough that my listing will sell at my price.
• Appears on the auction house. The availability alert: fire when at least one is listed at all, with an optional cap on the buyout. For crafted pre-raid pieces and rare bind-on-equip gear that are seldom listed and sell fast, so you hear about one without standing at the auctioneer.
• Median a percent above my cost basis. The exit alert: fire when what I hold is worth selling. It reads the lots in your Portfolio on that market and never fires without one.
• Listed quantity moves from its 7 day average. The supply swing: a flood (someone dumping a farm) or a drain (the shelf emptied before a raid night), either way.
• Enters its cheapest hours of the day. Fires when the clock enters the item's best three hours to buy, from its own hour-of-day pattern, once that pattern has a few days behind it. Clears when the hours pass, so it fires again the next day.
• Disenchant profit at or above. What the item disenchants for at current material medians, after the cut, less its cheapest listing.
• Crafting margin at or above. The best margin among the recipes that make it, at current medians.

Every alert is on one item and one market. The site checks them every 15 minutes against the latest scan and emails you, or posts to Discord or your browser if you set those up; the addon checks its own list whenever a new price table arrives and prints in chat.

Picking a threshold

1. Open the item page on your market and read the 30 day median. That is the item's normal price.
2. For a buying alert, set the price where the craft or the flip is clearly worth it, not where it is barely worth it. A margin that only exists at the threshold vanishes with the house cut.
3. For a percent alert, start at 25 percent under. Reset day and undercut wars push most items 10 to 15 percent under their monthly median without meaning anything; 25 is where it is worth a look.
4. For a selling alert, set it above the 30 day median by the amount that would make you walk to the auction house. If you would list at the median anyway, you do not need the alert; use the posting helper.

Why an alert goes quiet after it fires

A price that crosses your line usually stays across it for a while. Without a pause you would get the same email every 15 minutes until you deleted the alert. So a site alert that fires stays quiet while its rule keeps holding, for at least 24 hours, and even then fires again only if a newer scan than the one that fired it still shows the rule holding.

The moment the rule stops holding, because the price moved back across your line or the last unit sold, the alert re-arms, and it fires on the next scan where the rule holds again, however recent the last message. One message per real event, not one per check. It also means a line the price flickers across will fire on every crossing, so set it where a crossing means something.

The addon prints once per new price table, which arrives every 30 minutes with sync running, and keeps the recent ones in the window so a message you missed is still there.

Keeping the list honest

• Delete an alert when the trade is done. Removing an item from the watchlist removes its alerts with it.
• One alert per intent. A buy alert and a sell alert on the same item is fine; three buy alerts at slightly different prices is noise.
• Prefer the percent alert for anything seasonal. A fixed price that made sense in the leveling rush is wrong a month later.
• The site caps you at 25 alerts. That is a feature.

Site alerts go to the address you signed in with and nowhere else. The email has a manage link, and every alert fires only on scans that players uploaded, so a market nobody scans is a market with no alerts. If yours is quiet, scan it.