This sites takes a snap shot of the auction house from various servers and realms. This data is then processed and presented in graphs and trends.
The prices we have on the site eg: bid price, buyout price are all medians. This usually means it will mostly be a bit higher than lowest price or the average sane price.
On the individual item page you can see the minimum bid and buyout price. Remember this is a snap snot so some of those listing may have been brought out already.
Cost price works on crafted Items. It is the total cost of materials if each item was brought from the auction house.
This is useful if you want to a quick turnover where you can immediately buy the materials from the auction house and craft the item.
Alerts are triggers that be set on data for an item. You can set these alerts in the item page.
You can see which items have alerts set in your profile screen.
Just remember an alert triggers only once. You will have to reset it to trigger it again.
Triggers are only processed when we refresh the data on the site.
For all servers its every 6 hours. It usually takes about 1hr to scan and process all the data.
For warmane servers because of the Population cap there can be a large delay if the bots are put in to a queue, at that time the data is not scanned.
Yes you can download and use the snap shots we create in game. We use the Auctioneer Addon to take a snapshot of the auction house.
If you click On your server then select realm, Just below the faction you will see the option to download the data.
The downloaded file will be a AucScan-data.lua. This file needs to be placed *wow folder*/WTF/Account/*your_account_name*/SavedVariables/
That should do it.