Why free eBay alert tools stop taking new sign-ups

Item Alert's sign-up page says registration is closed

If you've looked for a free eBay alert tool, you've probably come across Item Alert. It's a free, browser-based tool that watches eBay for new listings, and it's been around for years. Try to sign up today, though, and this is what you get:

New account registration is currently disabled. Sorry for the inconvenience. See FAQ #29 for more details.

That's Item Alert's registration page. The FAQ entry it points to explains why:

Right now we're bumping up against our API limit and unfortunately eBay has declined a request to have it raised. So for now we are unable to accommodate new users. Over time we generally see users come and go, and when API usage on an average rolling basis drops to about 80% we open registration again.

So Item Alert hasn't shut down, and nothing on its site suggests existing accounts are affected. It's just full. The rest of this post is about what it's full of, because the same ceiling sits over every tool that watches eBay for you, ours included.

The ceiling is eBay's, and every outside tool sits under it

An outside tool can't watch eBay by browsing the site the way you do. It asks eBay's servers for listings through an API, the official channel eBay gives software for requesting data, and eBay counts every request.

eBay doesn't hide this. Its API call limits page says that "eBay limits the API call usage" and that "the limits on the total calls and the rate at which the calls can be made depend on the API." The default limits are "designed for individuals and smaller businesses." A tool that needs more can apply for what eBay calls an Application Growth Check, a review of whether the tool follows eBay's API License Agreement and "made the most efficient use of the APIs" before eBay grants a higher limit.

A review can end in a no, and Item Alert's FAQ says that's what happened. It doesn't say why eBay turned it down, and we won't guess.

Twenty seconds or an hour: what that does to the request count

Item Alert's selling point is speed. Its FAQ lists a refresh every 20 seconds, with up to 25 searches running at once. That's fast, and for some buyers it's the whole point.

Speed costs requests, though, and the math fits on a napkin. A day has 86,400 seconds. Check one search every 20 seconds and that's 4,320 checks a day. Check it once an hour and it's 24.

That's 180 times as many checks. It shows the shape of the problem, but it isn't a measurement of anyone's traffic. We don't know how Item Alert batches its requests, and its FAQ doesn't say. It also only runs while your browser tab is open, so someone who closes the tab at night isn't using any requests at all. The FAQ says so itself: "results are only being retrieved when a search is active and running in your browser."

Still, the direction is clear. A tool that checks every few seconds for every user burns through its share of eBay's capacity much faster than one that checks hourly. When it hits the ceiling, about the only thing left to do is stop letting new people in.

What fast checking actually buys you

Before you go hunting for the fastest replacement you can find, it's worth asking when speed actually matters.

It matters most for underpriced Buy It Now listings in busy categories, where somebody spots a pricing mistake within minutes. If that's your game, an hourly check will lose some of those races.

Even the fastest tool can't see a listing the second it goes up. Item Alert's own FAQ explains that a new listing "will not be visible to searches on the eBay website or the API until after a short period of time," so "more than 30 seconds may have passed" before any tool can see it.

For most buying, an hour is plenty:

• Auctions run for days. What you need is to know the auction exists before it ends, and it doesn't matter much if you hear about it an hour after it started.
• Rare items are a question of whether one turns up at all this month. Being 40 minutes late to a listing nobody else is watching costs nothing.
• Specific models and sizes in slower categories, where a good listing can sit for a day or more.
• Anything you'd want to think about first. Plenty of people end up regretting the buy they made in 20 seconds.

What's open right now

FindersKeepers is a free eBay alert tool, and you can start using it today with no waiting list. Here's what it does, including where it's slower than Item Alert.

• Hourly checks, run on our servers. We re-run every saved search that has alerts on once an hour. Anything new goes into an email queue that sends every five minutes. No tab needs to be open, and your laptop can be off. If you turn on browser push, that runs on its own hourly pass.
• No cap on saved searches. We don't limit how many searches you save, or how many of them run. We only refuse an exact duplicate, so the same search isn't run for you twice.
• 14 eBay sites, one at a time. You can pick the US, UK, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Canadian, Australian, Dutch, Irish, Polish, Austrian, Swiss or Belgian site. Each saved search runs on the site you picked for it, and prices show in the listing's own currency, with nothing converted.
• A deal label on the results page. We compare each listing's asking price with similar active listings on the same site. Once there are at least five to compare against, 20 percent or more below their average is a HOT DEAL, and 10 to 20 percent below is a Good Price. We use asking prices only, because we don't have sold-price data.
• Shareable search links. On your saved searches page you can turn any saved search into a link. Whoever opens it sees that search's current results on its eBay site without signing up, and you can revoke the link whenever you like. It's handy when you're hunting for somebody else, or when two of you are after the same thing.
• A Deals page for signed-in users. It shows eBay's own deals feed, on the US site only, because that's the only site where eBay gives us the feed.

We run on eBay's API too, under the same kind of limits. We have no sign-up cap today, and checking hourly is a big part of why, but no tool built on eBay's API can promise that'll never change.

Getting an alert set up in under a minute

You don't need an account to start. Search for whatever you'd have put into Item Alert, on whichever eBay site you buy from. If you're not signed in, a box appears after the third listing offering hourly alerts for that search.

Type your email address and we send you a link. Tap it, and the search is saved with email alerts on. No account exists until you tap, and there's no password to make up. If nothing new is listed in a given hour, you don't hear from us, so silence means the market was quiet.

If what you really need is Item Alert's 20-second checks, its FAQ says registration reopens when usage drops. Nothing stops you from using both. Our side-by-side page on Item Alert lays out where each one wins.