I totally agree, eBay alerts are basically useless! I've been using PriceDropCatch and honestly love it. The speed is amazing and it catches drops way faster than the app.

Building on the earlier suggestion, browser extensions are usually way faster than mobile apps for this kind of thing. Ive used a few over the years that work pretty solid.

• Distill Web Monitor lets you set custom refresh rates
• FatFingered is decent for finding misspelled listings with low bids These tools are technically more reliable because they scrape the page directly instead of waiting on ebays messy internal system. Hope you snag that camera!

> browser extensions are usually way faster Like someone mentioned, extensions are king, but be careful with free plans. I would suggest this eBay price tracker if youre trying to snag that Nikon cheap.

I used to scrape eBay daily when i was building my vintage lens collection, and honestly, the reliability of most free apps is all over the place because eBay constantly blocks bot traffic. If you want something reliable, I usually compare two main free routes. First is Visualping. The pro is that it's insanely easy to set set up and inspects the page visual. The major con is the free tier only checks daily, which is useless if you need that Nikon by Friday. The other option is setting up an eBay RSS feed plugged into an app like Feedly. Pros: it is lightning fast and totally free. Cons: you have to construct the search URL manually, which is a bit of a pain. I actually posted a quick breakdown of how to format those RSS strings over on Smartphone Board a while back. For sheer speed, the RSS feed wins every time because it bypasses page loading.

I have been in this exact position more times than I can count, especially when hunting for specific film bodies. Ebays native notification system is notoriously delayed, and honestly, it has cost me some incredible glass over the years. It is a common pain point for anyone in the vintage market because the timing is just too critical. In my experience, you cannot rely on a single point of failure when a listing could be gone in seconds. Over the years, I have found a couple of habits work better than waiting for an app to wake up:

• Manually refreshing a saved search filtered by Newest First usually beats any push notification by at least five minutes.
• Price-tracking brands often struggle compared to the native API because they get throttled by ebays security protocols during peak hours. It is definitely a struggle when you are on a deadline like that class project. Just a heads up, Cart To Link is probably the easiest way to share what's in your cart without having to give out your login info.