BullsEye Watches: hear about the restock before the other guy

You told a customer you'd call when the gun comes back in. Now you're checking three distributor sites every morning to see if it has. Somewhere around day four you forget, and the one that came in on Tuesday is gone by Thursday.

A BullsEye Watch does the checking and alerts you when it lands. Watches are included with Pro and Pro+.

What a watch is

A watch is one product, by UPC, that we check on a schedule. You choose which distributors count. That can be all of them or just the two you actually order from. When the product goes from out of stock to in stock at any of them, you get an alert.

You get one watch per UPC, and there's no limit on how many UPCs you watch.

Two ways to start one

The fast way is from search. When every distributor is out of the item you looked up, a BullsEye Watch button shows up above the results. Click it and you're watching.

The other way is BullsEye Watches in the sidebar, then Add New Watch. That's where you set the details: which distributors, how often to check, and where the alert goes.

Set the check schedule first

This is the setting that decides whether a watch is useful, and it's the one most people leave alone.

A watch only knows about a restock when it checks. New watches check once an hour. That's fine for a product that sits on the shelf for weeks once it's in. It's no good for an allocation that's gone in minutes. An hourly check can miss it completely.

The schedule menu runs from Every 5 minutes to Weekly on Sunday. A rough guide:

• Hard-to-get and allocated items: every 5 or 15 minutes.
• Things that come back every few weeks and sit a while: every hour or every few hours.
• Stuff you'd just like to know about eventually: daily is fine.

Schedule times are in UTC, so "Daily at 9 AM" means 9am UTC, not 9am where you are.

How the alert arrives

When a check sees the item come back, we hold the alert for up to 15 minutes before sending it. There are two reasons for that.

If five of your watches restock in the same window, you get one email listing all five instead of five emails. And if the item sells out again inside that window, we drop the alert. A restock that lasted ten minutes isn't worth an email you can't act on.

If a watch can't wait, flip the Instant switch on it in the Your Watches table. Instant watches skip the 15-minute grouping and alert you as soon as the check sees stock.

You only get a restock alert when an item goes from out to in. An item that stays in stock doesn't keep pinging you.

The morning roundup

Anything you're watching that has been in stock for two days or more goes into a daily email that arrives a little after 8am in your account's time zone. It's a nudge. This is still available, so do you still need the watch?

If you're done with one, turn it off from that email.

Price drops on things you're watching

While a watched item stays in stock, we keep an eye on its price too. If the lowest price falls at least 5% and at least $2 below the price in your last alert, you get a price-drop alert with the new price, how much it fell, and what it was before.

It has to clear both bars. A 40-cent wobble on a box of ammo won't ping you, and neither will a 2% move on a $900 rifle.

Turning a watch off from the email

Restock emails and the morning roundup have a Turn off this BullsEye link (Pause this Watch when the email covers one item). It opens a page that asks you to confirm, and Turn it off stops the watch. You don't have to log in. The link works for 30 days.

The confirm step is there on purpose. Some email security filters open every link in a message to scan it. Without that step, they'd be switching your watches off before you ever read the email.

Where the alert goes

Each watch has its own channel switches. They control push and in-app alerts for that one watch, and email for Instant alerts and price drops. Grouped restock emails and the morning roundup always go to your account email. To get alerts in Slack or your own system, set up a channel that receives Bullseye watch match.

Try it

BullsEye Watches are in the sidebar on Pro and Pro+. Look up something you've been waiting on, click BullsEye Watch when it comes up empty, then open the watch and set a check schedule that matches how fast it sells.

Not a member yet? Try the full Pro+ plan free for 7 days. No credit card needed until your trial ends.