eBay says your watchlist holds 1,000. Another eBay page says 300.

How many items can you add to your eBay watchlist?

Plan around 1,000. That's the ceiling on the eBay page dedicated to the watchlist, it's the higher of the two numbers eBay publishes, and it's the one to work with unless your own account tells you otherwise.

Here's the sentence, from the page that's actually about the watchlist:

You can add up to 1,000 items to your Watchlist

Quoted from eBay's watchlist help page.

We lead with 1,000 because that page is the one dedicated to the feature. That's a judgment about which page is on topic. It isn't evidence about the number, and those two things are worth keeping apart.

How much the disagreement costs you depends entirely on how many items you actually watch:

• Under 300 watched items, none of this touches you. Both eBay pages agree you've got room, and no article's opinion changes that.
• Between 300 and 1,000, you're inside the gap. One eBay page says you have hundreds of slots left. The other says you passed the limit a while back.
• Over 1,000, both pages agree you're above the line, and the practical question stops being which page is right and becomes what you're willing to clear out.

Counting your own list has one complication, and it comes from the removal rule further down this post. Ended listings sit on your watchlist for a while after they stop being buyable, so your list holds more entries than the number of live items you're tracking. eBay doesn't say whether those dead entries count toward the limit.

The page that says 1,000, and the page that says 300

The dedicated watchlist page says 1,000. eBay's page about using search says 300. Both are eBay's own help pages, and the two links below go straight to the sentences.

What this is:

• Two eBay-hosted pages, both reachable right now, giving different numbers for the same feature. Neither one is a blog post, a reseller forum, or a summary of eBay written by somebody else.
• Checkable in about thirty seconds. Open both links, use your browser's find function, and read the numbers yourself. We'd rather you did that than take our word for it, because the whole value of this observation is that you can check it without us.

What this is not:

• A tie we're going to break for you. Picking one number and stating it flatly is what everything else written about the watchlist limit does, and it's why the same question keeps coming back with two confident answers and no way to tell them apart.
• Something we're going to explain. eBay hasn't published a reason for the difference. A guess dressed up as an explanation would be worth less than the plain observation, and the plain observation is what this post is.

If you're anywhere near 300 watched items and the ceiling genuinely matters to you, the only answer that's definitely true for your account is the one you get by testing it. Keep adding past 300 and see whether eBay accepts them. That's more clicking than anyone wants to do, and it's still better evidence than either help page.

How long do items stay in your eBay watchlist?

Watched items stay until you remove them, with one documented exception: eBay drops an item that the seller ended and didn't relist after 60 days.

Verbatim, from the same watchlist page:

If an item added to your Watchlist is ended by the seller and not relisted after 60 days, it will be removed from your list.

Source: eBay's watchlist help page.

That rule is narrower than the version people repeat back, so it's worth reading slowly:

• It covers items the seller ended and didn't relist. It's not a general expiry that clears your whole list every two months.
• eBay doesn't say when the 60 days starts counting. Read it as roughly two months after the listing goes away. It isn't a deadline precise enough to plan around.
• eBay doesn't say whether those entries count toward the limit while they wait to be removed. That's the second question in this post that eBay's own pages leave open.

The practical effect is that an old eBay watchlist is part tracking list and part graveyard. Listings end, sell, and get relisted under new item numbers, and the entries you added sit there for weeks afterward. If you've been watching things for a year without pruning, a real share of what you're looking at isn't buyable anymore.

Our own watchlist handles the same problem with a setting instead of a fixed rule. A daily check looks for watched items we can't find on eBay anymore and marks those unavailable. What happens to them next is a dropdown in your profile with four options: never remove them, or remove them after 7 days, 30 days or 90 days. The default is 30 days. Never is a real choice, and some people pick it on purpose.

eBay documents one alert. Users report two more.

eBay's watchlist help page documents alerts for items that are ending soon. The other two things people expect, a nudge when the price drops and a nudge when the item sells, are widely reported by users and aren't on that page anywhere.

The two rows carry different consequences:

• A documented behavior gives you something to point at. When the alerts stop, you can at least work out whether the thing that stopped was ever offered.
• An undocumented behavior can change without anyone announcing it. Nobody has to tell you it stopped, because nobody said it was there.

That's the exact shape of the loudest complaint about eBay's other alerting feature, where saved search emails stop arriving and there is no setting to fix.

Three things a watchlist doesn't do, whatever alerts you get or don't get:

• It doesn't hold the item. Anyone can buy a watched fixed price listing while you're still thinking about it. Watching is a bookmark, not a claim.
• It doesn't bid for you. A watched auction that ends while you're asleep ends without you in it.
• It doesn't hand the seller your name. Sellers see a count and never a list of names, and on many listings that count is public to anyone: what a watcher count does and does not tell you.

Give these three jobs to a different tool

A watchlist tracks items you've already found. It's the wrong tool when what you want is items that don't exist yet, or the story of a price instead of today's number.

Here are the three jobs people try to give it, and what each one actually needs:

• Catching listings that haven't been posted yet. That's a saved search. eBay's saved searches send email alerts when new items matching your search are listed, plus an entry in your feed when you are signed in. We went through why those emails stop and which parts have no setting, and how eBay's saved searches compare with ours.
• Seeing what a price has been doing. A watchlist shows you the price right now and keeps nothing behind it, which is why eBay price history works nothing like Amazon price history. Nobody can hand you a chart that starts before somebody started recording, and that includes us.
• Measuring how much interest a listing has. Your watchlist is private and tells you nothing about anyone else's. The public watcher count is the number for that, and there are real limits on what it predicts.

Our own part in this is narrow, and worth saying plainly. Add an item to a FindersKeepers watchlist and we check its price every six hours and record what we find, so a line exists for that item from the day you added it. There's no version where that line starts earlier, for us or for eBay or for any tool selling you one. Nobody archived that listing's price before somebody chose to watch it.

Separately, an hourly check emails you about the watched items that moved: auctions inside their last 24 hours, fixed price listings down at least 5 percent since the last price we recorded, and auctions where the bid has climbed at least 10 percent. Each run sends one email covering the items that changed, and nothing at all in the hours when nothing did.

Two limits belong in the same breath as that offer. We cover eBay US only. And every price in that line is an asking price. When we score a listing, we compare it against the asking prices of similar active listings: at least five of them, measured against their average. We have no sold-price data and no way to get any. The score tells you a listing sits below what comparable sellers are currently asking. It cannot tell you what anybody actually paid.

An eBay watchlist answers one question well: is this thing still there. That's genuinely useful. It's also a different question from what this thing has been doing, which is the one you're usually asking by the time you've watched something for a month.