WowAce

- What is the enhancement in mind? How should it look and feel?

I shop to make a profit. Therefore I think it would be incredible useful if a plugin was made that showed the information necessary to make purchases decisions regarding raw mats.

My idea is the following: say you are browsing raw gems and you want to make a profit. In either an extra window or in the tooltip itself, besides the vendor and auction values, the "crafted" value should be added (at least, as an option). This "crafted" value would be the name of a gem that the raw gem can be crafted into, with its price next to it. So that whenever I mouse over Alicite, for example, I will be able to easily tell that Quick Alicite (or any other Alicite products) will render a profit, therefore making it a good investment.

- Please provide any additional information below.
I know this is a little over the top for a simple and minimalist AH addon, but the concept is so great that if done correctly it doesn't have to add any clutter at all. It would also give people access to a lot more information to make purchase decisions.

I think it would require a small database (perhaps split between crafts to make it easier on the memory and easier to manage?) linking raw mats with the final product. Or perhaps an usage of the wowhead API, if such thing exists? After the link is made in the DB all there would be to it, is just call the historical price for the product which should already be in the current AuctionLite DB.

Most professions aren't as simple as Jewelcrafting, in terms of the relationship between a trade good and a product. It would be possible for an addon to look up all the profession spells available to you that can use the item you're pointing at, and give you the highest... But I think most people don't just browse the AH looking for something like that. They do it the other way around - determine what products are worth selling, and then check to see if the materials for those products are available.

There are a number of addons that show you that kind of information in the profession window (LilSparky's Workshop), or on item tooltips (Tradeskillinfo). There are also a number of specialized AH addons that take your professions into account, and will search for materials, and make reccomendations on what to purchase, what to craft, and what to list it for. I can't think of any offhand, because I don't use them, preferring AuctionLite, but you can just browse the auction house categories here on wowace or curse and look for something that suits your needs.