We recently began receiving several emails daily questioning how things work, or for that matter, how things don’t seem to work. We also are seeing many new visitors to our website. As a result, I will provide a brief update. I will try to keep this as quick and as simple as possible.

Understand, if you receive an alert, it is because we saw stock was available for purchase regardless of the sources we use to determine that availability. So in simple terms, we saw stock was available and alerted you. Whether you were able to purchase that item or not is dependent on a few factors:

Amount of Stock

We do not look for, and even more rarely do we ever know, how much inventory is available. So we alert regardless. There might be just one pack of toilet paper available. This, in fact, happens more than we like, but it is a factor that is out of our control. Also, your preconceived notions on how much inventory there is when stock is released, even when a mass amount is released, is probably not even near the actual amount released.

A lot of seemingly false alerts…
Another thing we have gleaned over the years with regards to the amount of stock… at first there will be a major drop of inventory, then you will go through a period post-drop where alerts seem wrong for a period of time as one-offs (order cancellations) are reentered into the system from that last batch. These reentered one-off items, which appear like false alerts, can go on for some time. This is especially true whenever people are pre-ordering items, then get their hands on another item prior to receiving a shipment notification on the first item which results in them canceling that first item.

Demand

We have thousands of visitors all vying for the same items. Yes, you are not the only one looking. Combine this with the amount of stock and you can see where things start to go awry.

Delivery Speed of Alerts

Yes, it is our job to deliver timely alerts and to do so, we offer a variety of options to receive alerts ensuring we reach as many people as quickly as possible in the least amount of time. We offer alerts via email, text, our own Browser Alerts system, Google Groups (links to groups are on each tracker page when active), and now DISCORD. The slowest are emails and text. The other three are the fastest. When we hit an internal delivery alert threshold we try to push users to the other methods. The DISCORD app, even though we are still testing, appears to be very fast. Google Groups is also very fast and if you follow our instructions, you can forward these emails to your mobile devices as a text. Our Browser Alerts system is also very fast but requires you to have a browser tab to be open.
PLEASE NOTE: Sometimes our alerts are faster than Amazon updates their pages. So stick around and keep refreshing the product pages! We’ve seen our alerts be up to 5 minutes early.

Response Speed from You

Another factor is fast you react fast once alerted. As long as you are on top of our alerts, you are doing your best. But if you receive an alert and do not address it for 5 minutes, you might be too late.

Unsubscribe!

You might assume that people unsubscribe once they get the items they need but this does not always happen. So help out others – once you are successful, or just maybe get too frustrated – please unsubscribe from the alerts so others have the best chance to get the items they need.

…Hang in There!

You will likely need to try multiple times to acquire the items you want. You might get frustrated, but then again you might get lucky and acquire it after the first alert. You just have to keep trying. Lastly, if you feel it is stressing you out too much, or you just don’t believe our system works, please feel free to delete your account. There is no need for excess stress in these difficult times.

Stay Safe!
~Justin

Categories: General
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