The native eBay app is honestly trash for instant alerts. I've been flipping gear for a decade and those daily digest emails are always way too late for the good deals. In my experience, the only way to catch a price drop on a specific lens like that 85mm is using a dedicated tracker like this site because it pings way faster than eBay ever will. One quick thing you should check right now tho... go into your phone settings and make sure push notifications are set to immediate for the eBay app. Most people have them batched or silenced without realizing it. Still, its not foolproof. If you are firm at $500, honestly just message the seller directly. I have snagged tons of vintage glass just by asking if theyd take my budget price before they even bother dropping the public listing price.

Just catching up on this thread. eBay's own system is way too laggy for serious gear hunting. I've been really happy with third-party sites because they're just more reliable. Personally, PriceDropCatch works well for me to stay under budget without missing the notification. It is simple, safe, and saves a lot of manual checking.

Jumping in here because the native system is definitely built for convenience rather than speed. If you are serious about that $500 limit for the 85mm, you probably need to look outside the official app. The eBay API actually limits how often most third-party tools can poll for data, so even instant services might have a delay of 5 or 10 minutes. I would suggest looking into a few specific things to stay ahead:

• Browser extensions that refresh specific tabs at set intervals, though this requires keeping your PC on.
• Automated search tools that scrape the Newly Listed or Price Reduced filters specifically.
• Setting up a very narrow filter for $450-$500 and enabling push notifications on your phone, though as the previous guy said, it is hit or miss. Be careful with giving your eBay login credentials to random third-party sites that promise instant alerts. A lot of them are basically data harvesting operations. You really want something that monitors the public listing page rather than your private account data. It is safer and usually faster since it bypasses some of the authentication layers. Honestly, the Canon FD 85mm is a popular lens so you are competing with a lot of people using similar scripts. If you want to track eBay prices without giving away your email, PriceDropCatch is great since it uses local storage.