Shopping operations are used to perform scans of the auction house for an item or a group of items. You can run shopping scans for several groups at the time where TSM will scan all the groups and show the pricing data relative to what you have defined in your operation. You can only apply one shopping operation to a group, as you would typically not have a use for multiple levels of shopping prices. There are two ways you can make a new operation. You can go to the operations pane on the TSM main window and click the add button next to the operation type. The other option is to go to a group and the group operations pane. You can then click the drop down menu and select “create a new operation” as shown below. In both cases you will be taken to the operation options. The second method has an advantage in that it automatically applies the operation to the group you made the operation for, which saves you a bit of time. The options you can set in a shopping operation are shown in the screenshot below. The most important one to define is the maximum price. This is typically the highest price you will want to buy an item at.
If you set this correctly you can often just mindlessly buy anything below the maximum price when your scan has finished, which saves you a lot of time. Show auctions above max price, which chooses if you want to show the auctions above your maximum price in the results pane, and the neat stacks only checkbox that eliminates stuff like stacks of 1.