Frequently Asked Questions

What is the free account?
Why do you only search for fixed price items and not auction-style items?
Why is a search not able to search across more than one eBay site?
Why do I not get notified when the price of an existing item is revised?
What are the advantages to the way the searches work?
How much is this going to cost?
Why are my notifications delayed?
Why Do I receive Notifications for the Same Item More Than Once?
Why Did I Not Get a Notification for an Item That is on eBay?
Why Did I Get a Notification for an Auction Style Listing?

What is the free account?

If you register, then you are able to create one (non-expiring) search without having to purchase search credits. This search:

Can be on any Ebay site that Buy Now Search covers.
Can remain active indefinitely. You need never purchase credits!
Can cover up to three Ebay categories. These categories have to be a bottom level categories (items can only be listed on eBay in bottom level, leaf, categories - more info).
Can be edited as often as you want, changing eBay site, category, search terms, price range, etc.
Must have search terms of at least 5 characters (including spaces between terms) (e.g. "Sony PS4" or "PS4 slim", but not "PS4" which is too short).
Can have 'exclude' search terms.
Can only cover a narrow price range - but still enough to ensure that you can find a bargain.
Can use 'ship to' information.
Canuse Postal Code information to help you identify newly listed items local to you.
Can search across all Eurozone eBay sites simultaneously.

Why do you only search for fixed price items and not auction-style items?

Fixed price items can be bought, and disappear, within minutes of being listed. Whereas auction-style listings last a minimum of three days - eBay itself offers a service to email you search results daily. We see no need to compete with eBay's daily alert service for auction-style items.

Why is a search not able to search across more than one eBay site?

Different eBay sites have the prices specified in different currencies - so a search for items between 50 and 100 units of currency will give different results depending upon the site that the search is being run against. There is an exception with sites that use the Euro currency - there is an option to search across 'Eurozone' sites when you are searching in a Eurozone site.

Why do I not get notified when the price of an existing item is revised?

It is not easy to identify items which have had their price has been revised. To bring you that service we would have to continually check the price of every fixed price item on eBay. With the millions of fixed price items available on eBay at any one time, this is not something we can do.

What are the advantages to the way the searches work?

A 'Buy Now Search' search does not work in the same way as an eBay search and will not bring back the same results - although they are similar.

For example: On eBay, when items are in the wrong category AND the category is a brand name, all items will be brought back when you search for that brand name within that category (even items that don't have that brand name in the title). Our system does not do this - meaning that you don't get back items that you weren't searching for.

We believe that the way our search system works is fully logically correct and is easy to work with to get the search results that you want.

However, do note that our searches do not use 'fuzziness' to bring back items that the system thinks that you meant to search for.

How much is this going to cost?

See the Help section about Credits.

Why are my notifications delayed?

There are a number of factors involved :

eBay time differs from the actual time. It is reasonable for eBay time to differ from actual time by 45 seconds. Click here to find the current eBay time in the USA. So you notification may only appear to be delayed whilst not actually being delayed.
Items can take a few minutes, after being listed by the seller, to appear on eBay.
Once they have appeared on eBay we typically will have found it within one minute - but this can be up to two minutes.
Once we have found an eBay item, it will take between 1 second and 90 seconds for us to identify it as something that matches one of your searches.
Typically it takes a few seconds for our server to 'find' your email provider's mail server. If your email provider has an outage, or they or we are suffering Domain Name System problems, then this time can be longer.
Your email provider probably checks incoming mail for spam - this can take any amount of time, but is often less than one minute.
Your email software may not be configured to pick up and display new mail immediately. In bad cases your email software may only collect new messages every ten minutes or so. If you suffer from this problem you may wish to find an expert to set you up with different email software or with a different email account.

Why Do I receive Notifications for the Same Item More Than Once?

You receive one notification for every one of your searches that matches an item. It is possible to have different searches that all match a particular item - with each search sending you a notification for that same item.

Why Did I Not Get a Notification for an Item That is on eBay?

There are a number of reasons why you may have found an item on eBay that you were not notified of by Buy Now Search:

The item is for sale via auction style listing only, not with a fixed price.
The item may have been revised since being first listed and may not have matched your search when it was first listed (note that we only search newly listed items).
You may not have a search active in the correct category, on the correct eBay site, with the correct criteria to have matched the item.
Unfortunately a very small proportion of items slip past our system unnoticed - the item in question may simply have been missed by our system.

Why Did I Get a Notification for an Auction Style Listing?

If an item is listed as an auction style listing, but with a Buy It Now price. It is possible that someone bid on the item, which automatically removes the Buy It Now price, before you viewed it.