Deals Tracker

Used to work great, now half of my sesrches show 0 items, even though there are tons of those items on ebay. Tried uninstalling and reinstalling but still shows 0 for lots of searches that have items available.

Great app. Managed to grab many bargains using it. A little tweaking needs to be done to your subscriptions to get the best results 👍

About a week ago I saw that the best deals by far on Lenovo P50 laptops were Buy It Nows that were probably going very quickly. The same seemed to be true of another item I was monitoring eBay for; an OEM Pentax D-BG5 battery grip for my Pentax K-3 camera. So I searched for apps that might alert me immediately to new arrivals on eBay, and installed two -- this one and eFerret. I set up searches in both apps for both items. A couple hours later I was talking to my wife and kid when my phone alarm started ringing. And ringing and ringing. I didn't want to interrupt the conversation and figured it was ringing once for each of several new arrivals. But it just didn't stop. My wife and kid were looking at me like I was crazy. So finally I pulled out my phone and dismissed the alert. I was surprised to find that it had found only one item. Later I found that it was ringing endlessly every time it found something. I looked and looked for the reason it was doing such a crazy and obnoxious thing and finally found that it was a setting called "Wake me up", which is on by default. Well, I say that's a bad default. Imagine it ringing during a business meeting. If the developers are keen on the feature and want to promote it rather than let users discover it, they could highlight it during app setup, and let the user decide then whether to turn it on. And instead of just "Wake me up", it should be clearly described with, "Wake me up -- ring continuously until stopped". An important difference between these two apps I noticed is that eFerret allows limiting the search to an eBay category, while this one does not. On this app, that has meant building up a huge list of excluded words for each search. My P50 search now has 29 exclusions! And some are very broad, such as "for" -- broad enough to lead to some false negatives, but that's better to me than being constantly alerted to false positives such as "screen for Lenovo P50". I don't want to exclude "screen" as it sometimes appears in the auctions I want to see. So far, my entire experience with this app has been dismissing alerts for false positives and adding words to the exclusion lists. Meanwhile, I haven't heard a peep from eFerret. That may be a good thing but I won't know until it does or doesn't alert me to a desired hit. UPDATE IN RESPONSE TO DEVELOPER'S RESPONSE: Thanks, but I never looked at the settings screen until finding it to turn off the setting. Maybe your app is doing things you don't know it's doing. In any case, just calling it "Wake me up" isn't enough; it should make it explicitly clear that it's going to ring incessantly until turned off. Regarding the category, I did see down at the bottom where it says "More filters" and tapped it, but nothing happened. I tried again today and saw that I was supposed to look below that where it said "eBay", and then to the right of that where it said "Change". That isn't very intuitive. When I pressed "Change", it insisted on showing me a new search hit first, and when done with that, I was back to the main screen. I pressed Change again and this time it let me in to the additional filters. And I see that one of them is Category. That's good, but it shouldn't be that hidden. Look, eFerret puts the category selection on the main screen right next to the item name. That's where it belongs. Making it that involved to get to Category is not good interface design.