Looking for an eBay Alert Tool

[Capt Caveman]

eBay doesn't currently have what I'm looking for. Does eBay or some other place have some tool that will alert me if a particular item meets my search criteria?

A google search comes up with different stuff but not sure what's legit or not.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

bid sniping?

 

[Capt Caveman]

No. My dog ate the remote control of my home theater receiver and I wanted to get a replacement remote.

Currently, the remote isn't available on eBay but one was listed last month. I'd like to be alerted when this item comes available again instead of having continually do a search.

 

[Capt Caveman]

nvm. I found something.

 

[kranky]

You can absolutely do that on ebay. Set up a "saved search" and flag it to be notified if there is a match.

 

[Capt Caveman]

You can absolutely do that on ebay. Set up a "saved search" and flag it to be notified if there is a match.

Thanks. Yeah, I discovered when performing an advance search.

 

[parker15]

As already mentioned, you can set up a saved search on ebay itself, but you'll only receive 1 email per day at most.

You can use a 3rd party site like http://www.ebuyersedge.com that will check ebay as often as every 5 minutes for your saved searches, immediately sending you an email if a match is found.

This gives you a jump on any other potential bidders/buyers that have an alert set up through ebay. You'll just need to watch your emails so as not to miss out on a potential deal or very hard to find item.

This works best with 'Buy It Now's, but is also effective with auctions.

The home page is set up for misspellings, but you can save 'original term' searches individually from the 'search' page. The home page is just to give you a head start on some ideas for searches, you should narrow them down by using 'exclude' words, category, etc.

bid sniping?

That's something different. Sniping is waiting until the last few seconds of an auction to place your bid. The idea behind it is to avoid drawing unwanted attention to an item (more bids = more attention) and possible bidding wars.

You can snipe manually or use a service or software. I'd go with a service because there's more potential problems with desktop software (power outage, forgetting to leave pc on, etc.). http://www.hidbid.com is one to try, but there's more out there.

Just remember that regardless of when your bid is placed (sniping or bidding early), you still have to have the highest bid to win (unless 2 bids are the same or there's not enough of a difference between them to meet ebay's minimum bid increment.

Also, you should understand ebay's proxy bidding system and know their minimum bid increments, when sniping or buying on ebay period.

Here are links to the minimum bid increments:

http://pages.ebay.com/help/buy/bid-increments.html

http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/basics/e_item11.html

http://pages.ebay.de/help/buy/bid-increments.html

http://pages.ebay.com.au/help/buy/bid-increments.html

http://pages.ebay.ca/help/buy/bid-increments.html