It’s not often on Tamebay we come across a completely new tool or service. Sure there are a ton of great products out there, but often when a new service comes along it’s an iteration of existing tools from other providers. It might have new features but it effectively does the same job.
Today however we’ve found Buy Now Search which discovers brand new recently listed fixed price items on eBay. We’ve not seen this before.
My first thought was why would I want to find new Buy It Now listings? The chances are that they’ll be on eBay for anything up to 30 days so I’ve plenty of time to discover them if I want to buy them. I have saved searches and even the new eBay Feed, so I already have options to find new products.
The thing is though sometimes an item is listed in fixed price format at a bargain price. At other times I may be searching for a rare item which may only be listed on eBay once a year. In these cases the first buyer to spot the item will probably have paid for it before I ever see the eBay listing.
That’s where Buy Now Search comes in, they’ll notify me within minutes of a new eBay listing that matches my saved search criteria.
There is a cost to use Buy Now Search, but it’s tiny! Each search will cost you one credit which is valued at £0.00001. If a matching product is found there’s a charge of ten credits (£0.0001). The cost of your searches depends upon the number of times your searches are run and the number of times your search matches an item.
By now you might be laughing at the cost, but if you have a broad search term in a top level eBay category then the millions of hits start adding up. You’ll also be getting a lot of emails arrive in your inbox. Buy Now Search has some advice on how to narrow your searches and of what type of searches will result in high charges.
Used judiciously Buy Now Search could find you some absolute bargains, either for yourself or potential products for resale at a profit. If you want to give the service a spin Buy Now Search offer a free trial which doesn’t expire so your search can stay live forever for free.
16 Responses
Hi Chris
Isn’t this the same as the push notifications on the eBay iPhone app, where it alerts you when anything matching your criteria is listed?
What about doing an eBay search for your desired item, sort by newly listed, filtered on BIN and then copying the RSS feed from the search results page on eBay into an RSS reader?
Most readers can be set to refresh every few minutes if you really want to & are available for every mobile & desktop out there.
As usual I’ve probably missed the point though! 🙂
Steve
perfect tool to get that bargain. !
Chris, this isn’t new at all. For the past 3 – 4 years I’ve seen one of these pop up once every few months. Someone is always posting one they’ve made on /r/eBay on Reddit or in the developers forums. I was going to make one myself back in 2009 since the underlying technology is very similar to a repricer which I’d already built. There were two reasons I didn’t though:
1) eBay doesn’t allow buying apps in their App center.
2) It isn’t a sustainable business and it never can be.
Why can’t it ever really work? eBay limits each app to 1.5M searches per day. Now imagine you want alerts in real time. I’ve seen apps that claim to do this and they literally poll eBay once every second and charge a flat fee to do it. The problem is there are 86400 seconds in a day which means the app can only monitor 18 products at any given time. Drop the speed down and you can have more products monitored but you reduce the effectiveness obviously but this is something that absolutely needs to be performing quick and frequent searches.
Good luck to the developer but as I’ve told every one that has presented this idea to me it is going to be next to impossible to turn into a real profitable business.
Could be done via a scraper and not api
You got me really excited when I saw your post about a Buy It Now bargain hunter. The fact that the picture suggest that it has mobile ability or a mobile app had me running to review it.
I just finished extensively reviewing this application and I can say I’m very confused at to who the target audience is and what type of user would be willing to pay for the features that Buy Now Search offers.
As a sniping pro, I’m more incline to wonder why anyone would pay to use this application that offers no competitive advantage over more robust and free applications on the marketplace.
In the end, I was actually a bit bummed that I spent the time to review something that offered no additional value to bargain hunters that’s not already out there. Anyways, I already spent the time to review, so if you would like to see why I think this app is not ready for use, you can check it out here.
https://www.asnipe.com/review-of-buy-now-search-a-new-buy-it-now-ebay-sniping-deal-finder/
Thanks for the article, it really has me motivated to maybe develop something soon.
If people are looking for “eBay bargain hunting” software, have a look at Bay Prospector. Sadly it’s Windows only but it runs perfectly well in VMWare / Parallels on Mac.
Great for precisely tailoring your searches based on all kinds of criteria, automatically re-running searches every ‘n’ minutes, filtering in or out stuff you’re not looking for (including the use of regular expression pattern matching for advanced stuff). It’s cheap and there’s a free ‘Lite’ version. Even includes a server-side sniping tool* for listings you want to bid on.
https://www.bayprospector.com/ Nothing to do with me, I just use it.
Steve
*I’ve written a little external script that allows Bay Prospector to use Gixen for sniping if anyone wants it. Gixen has a few more options than the Bay Prospector sniping server, but both are free.