What's Most Popular on eBay, as Voted by eBay Users

Update: WatchCount.com in 2023

Mega apologies for an uber-tardy update. Gosh, it's been many moons since our last news posting here. Yes, we survived Covid-19, BLM riots, and related global mayhem we're all tired of talking about.
Where are we at? Well, not much has changed on our site in a long, long time. Please know that eBay's API/developer platform has evolved greatly over the past several years, and frankly we've hardly kept up with it all.
This means we haven't launched any new search tools for our website. (Booo!) And it also means some may drop off in the coming months. (Looking at you, Completed Items search tool, who's running on borrowed time...)
We'll do our best to keep things running with as much functionality as everyone's used to, but please forgive us as a wheel drops off from time to time... (Ok, that's it for now.)

Retired: WCC WordPress Plugin & Dynamic WTI Link

We're announcing today that we're (finally) retiring 2 tools: the WatchCount.com WordPress Plugin (WCCWPPI), and the Dynamic Watch This Item Link (DWTIL). They will be sunset effective 01-Mar-2019 (or soon thereafter). We're doing this for a variety of reasons, including low usage. If you have any questions, please see our earlier announcement, or contact us.

Just Launched: eBay Most Watched Items 2.0 Search Tool

We're pleased to announce the launch of our new eBay Most Watched Items 2.0 search tool here on WatchCount.com ! Check it out right here.
Our new tool offers some sweet improvements and additional search functionality over its predecessor. You can now do things like: search for most watched (MW) items limited to just auctions or BINs; easily drill down into specific subcategories; see MW items of a particular seller; see the Watch Counts on active zero-bid auctions; see additional pages of item results; search listing descriptions; limit results by price range.
Some of these extra features are things our visitors have been requesting for years. Due to some recent technical upgrades on eBay's developers platform, we're only now able to offer many of these handy knobs and dials.
This launch comes on the heels of a long and disappointing MW search outage on our site (read more about that below). We're happy that in repairing/migrating the broken API data feeds, eBay was able to add enhancements to their platform that now enable us to provide these new features.
If you use our eBay Item Lookup tool (to review details on a specific listing), we'll soon be integrating our new technical functionality there to make it easy to see the Watch Count of almost any active eBay item. In the meantime, you can still do so via an easy workaround link located in the bulleted footer on that page.
Thank you for visiting WatchCount.com , and please reach out to us if you have any feedback on this new tool.
Update: We've also just added MW as a sorting option over on our Sold Items & Completed Listings tool. Some searchers might find this quite insightful alongside seeing final Watch Counts of sold items, whether for a specific seller, a broad category, or a carefully crafted keyword phrase.

Deprecated: WCC WordPress Plugin

Today we're announcing that we've begun the deprecation process for the WatchCount.com WordPress Plugin (WCCWPPI). This is our free plugin that displays eBay items on your WordPress (WP) blog.
This deprecation notice means that at some point in the future, our plugin will completely cease functioning.
In the meantime, we're offering limited support for the plugin, and it should continue working in the short-term. We don't yet have a concrete deprecation timeline in place, but current plugin functionality (eBay API feed issues notwithstanding) should continue being offered for at least a few more months.
For long-term use, we recommend you explore/consider other eBay-themed WP plugins. Later in 2017 is when we'll likely need to pull the plug fully on the WCCWPPI, although it's possible we'll have to do so sooner.

Most Watched Items Searches are Offline

Sadly, over the past few days our eBay Most Watched (MW) Items search tools have been mostly non-functional, affecting keywords-based searches. Searching with any phrase often brings up zero search results. This can be seen on our homepage MW search tool as well as on our MW Advanced Search page.
This downtime is due to problems with eBay's data feeds that they allocate to us as part of their API/developer platform, for retrieving and displaying MW items on our website. We've contacted them seeking repair, and we're told they're working on it.
We've placed an outage alert notice on our homepage that appears when MW searches are attempted. Once eBay fixes the problem (whether it takes days, weeks, or months), and we're done testing to confirm all's well, we'll be sure to remove that yellow notice.
This eBay API data feed failure also affects the display of Watch Counts in other places on our site, such as in our eBay Item Lookup tool. MW searches in our WordPress plugin may also be impacted.
We're disappointed that we can't offer MW searches right now, as that's the hallmark of our website; but our hands are tied until eBay makes necessary repairs. Once they fix things, MW searches should immediately begin working again on our site.
In the meantime, you may consider using alternative search tools we offer that aren't impacted by the data feed failure.
You can search auctions by Most Bids. … For deep sub/category-only MW items search results, use our Standard Search tool, then click the tiny blue-gray "[mw]" links which directly click you over to our MW Advanced Search results for that subcategory. … Also, pasting in an eBay listing # (or URL) on our homepage should still provide specific item lookup info/pricing (albeit without Watch Counts).
Update: The problems continue and now impact category-based MW searches as well. Zero Watch Counts may be returned.

Just Launched: 2 New eBay Search Tools

We're happy to announce the launch of 2 new eBay search tools here on WatchCount.com !
You can now perform straightforward eBay searches (or browse eBay) from WatchCount.com , for both completed items and active listings.
Our Sold Items & Completed Listings tool does just that – search eBay listings going back several weeks for items that have ended and/or sold.
For basic searching and browsing of live eBay listings, just use our new Standard Search tool.
Until now, our array of niche eBay search tools/features, while very handy for certain audiences, wasn't always too helpful for visitors who simply wanted to construct a plain ol' eBay search while still comfortably cruising around our website. So, we finally went ahead and fixed that!
Thanks for visiting WatchCount.com , and please get in touch if you have any feedback on these new tools.

Retired: eBay Buyer/Bidder History Search Tool

Today we've retired our Buyer/Bidder History Search Tool (on eBay's polite request). Over its 1+ year of existence, we'd heard from many eBayers who used it, expressing a whole spectrum of feelings about it. We'd been told it was helpful to many small sellers for a variety of reasons. But some users also understandably felt quite the opposite about it. It was somewhat controversial, so we considered it (and clearly labeled it) Experimental from the start.
But its short life has come to an end, as we're now permanently sunsetting this clever little tool.
As always, thank you for visiting WatchCount.com !

Retiring the WatchCount.com Widget

Very soon we'll be retiring our long-standing WatchCount.com Widget for eBay Sellers. This is our free widget that some sellers have included in their listings to broadcast how many watchers the item has.
We're needing to decommission our Widget after 7 years due to recent platform changes at eBay. The eBay developers team announced that the programming functionality that we use to power the Widget is deprecated and will soon be terminated, so we have to shut our Widget down beforehand.
We'll be turning off the Widget on or shortly after 20-Aug-2015. If you have the Widget in your listings, please be sure to remove the Widget HTML code before then (thanks).

RIP eBay Classic/Wildcard Search Tool

Sadly, as of approximately 24-Feb-2015, our eBay Classic/Wildcard Search Tool has been non-operational, most likely permanently. This is due to recent changes on the eBay platform that no longer support accessing their classic search framework as our tool had done for a couple years. Our tool has been reduced to now only performing standard eBay searches. (Much less exciting, indeed.)
Please keep in mind that our eBay Most Watched search tool continues to be wildcard-compatible. But it's a different beast, may not reliably be wildcard-compatible going forward, and is not a complete replacement for our former Classic/Wildcard tool.
That said, we're happy that we got a good two years out of its functionality, extending the life of eBay wildcard searches beyond its official/announced termination towards the end of 2012. We'd received praise from a number of happy eBay shoppers who were excited to have discovered our tool that enabled them to continue targeted, yet broad, searches on eBay in a way that's only afforded by including the classic wildcard symbol in a search query.
It's unlikely that we'll be able to resurrect this tool.:(Still, we'll be on the search for any viable replacement functionality, and should we discover anything worthwhile, we'll post about it here or in our low-volume newsletter.
Thank you for your continued support and use of WatchCount.com !

Just Launched: eBay Buyer/Bidder History Search Tool

We've just launched our new Buyer/Bidder History Search Tool, which attempts to display all items a user purchased or won within the last several weeks. This new tool is meant as a near-identical replacement for the former, long-standing Advanced Search by Bidder search functionality eBay had offered for many years, but retired just a couple months ago. Our new tool is free to use, just like all of WatchCount.com's tools and services.
While either party in an eBay transaction can make use of our tool, we had small eBay sellers in mind while developing it. We learned that those who knew about and used the similar, former eBay search tool had some solid reasons to put it to good use:

• to help identify and corroborate suspicious buyer behavior or claims
• to assist in manually cross-selling other eBay items, such as a custom-printed promo flyer inserted in outgoing shipments
• to help reveal trending products and general purchasing behavior
• to offer some measure of bidder vetting on high value bids
• to enable sellers who receive misdirected customer inquiries to relay the buyer to the proper eBay seller

As with all of our alternative eBay search tools, we're dependent on functionality served by eBay's publicly accessible developers platform. With eBay having recently sunset their similar Advanced Search by Bidder tool, the longevity of their back-end API support (and thus that of our own tool) is unclear to us. As such, we've tagged our new search tool as Experimental for the time being (as we did with our Classic/Wildcard search tool), but we still remain cautiously optimistic that eBay's API platform will continue to support us going forward.

Jump to eBay Collections from WatchCount.com

By now you've probably heard of eBay Collections, eBay's visually engaging showcase of professionally curated content in many popular categories. Moreover, any eBay shopper or seller can assemble their own collections set, optionally making it available to be viewed by anyone.
We've just made it a tad easier to tap into all of those collections, based on whatever keyword search you've entered into our Most Watched items search tool.
Just look for the [eco] link above/near our search results, which will take you to eBay Collections, targeting the search terms you've entered. (This direct link is currently only available for eBay.com (US) users, but we hope to expand it to eBay UK in the near future.)

Now See Similar eBay Items

We recently added a tiny new feature to most of our search results pages.
You can now click the small "similar items" link and be taken to eBay where you'll see a list of items similar to the one you're viewing.
eBay's internal algorithms assemble this list of about 20 individual products and presents them right on the view-item page. This can help familiarize yourself with other like-products for sale on eBay, in case the one you're viewing isn't quite what you're looking for.
Keep an eye out for that special link while you're cruising around WatchCount.com…

eBay Radio Interviews WatchCount.com

We just concluded speaking live with Jim "Griff" Griffith and Lee Mirabal of eBay Radio (eBay's official online radio network). It was a fun chat as we roamed around WatchCount.com exploring some of our eye-opening eBay search tools.
Griff started us out at the homepage's Most Watched search utility. Then we made a pit stop at our Top eBay Searches page before Lee then asked us to give her the scoop on our lesser-known Best Offer selling price lookup feature.
All in all we had a good time, shared some laughs, and hopefully exposed some more eBayers to our creative and unique web apps. (You can listen to the archived radio segment.)

Just Launched: eBay Classic/Wildcard Search Tool

We've been eager to provide a functional, alternative wildcard search tool ever since eBay removed said searching capability from their site late last year.
At last, we're now proud to launch such a search utility on our site, enabling eBay wildcard searching by leveraging eBay's classic search engine framework.
On our eBay Classic/Wildcard Search page, simply enter your query with wildcard character/symbol (*) included, and we'll generate for you a special eBay-destined search link that'll take you to eBay, handling your wildcard search on eBay properly, processing the wildcard syntax as you intended it with complete search results – the way it used to be!
You'll see that our new search tool also provides many of eBay's typical advanced search options, including Completed Listings, Best Offer filtering, and deep subcategory accessibility.
Note that currently our homepage Most Watched search tool is still wildcard-enabled as well.
Are you new to wildcards? Wildcard functionality is used to substitute characters in a search keyword to help broaden the searcher's intent, offering a level of expansiveness and granularity with a simple asterisk. This can help, for example, to quickly turn up keyword misspellings, plurals, years, part numbers, and themes. A search for dress*, for example, can return results that include dress, dresser, dresses, dressed, etc. Here's a live example of wildcard-supported search, when looking for books from the 1800s. By comparison, see eBay's standard search results without wildcard handling. … Update: Stuart Turnbull kindly made another short YouTube video recently to illustrate the usefulness of our new search tool.
We hope you enjoy this new handy search utility we've built, and – as always – we welcome your feedback, comments, and suggestions.

eBay Sold Items: Best Offer Selling Price

We just added a tiny new feature to WatchCount.com that we think a small number of our visitors will appreciate.
This is relevant to already-completed eBay listings that sold via Best Offer instead of the original BIN asking price, within the prior couple few weeks.
If you're curious what its final selling price was, just use our Item Lookup feature by pasting the several-digit eBay listing number (or the entire eBay URL) into the 'Keywords' box on our homepage then clicking the "Show Me...!" button.
You'll then see basic item details, now including the final Best Offer sold-for price. (We try to display the selling price outright, if we can; otherwise, we'll link to an eBay page that shows it to you there.)
Update: Stuart Turnbull kindly made a short YouTube video recently to illustrate how easy it is to use this search feature.

Just Launched: Most Popular eBay Searches

We're excited to launch a new search tool here on WatchCount.com: Most Popular eBay Searches! With it, you can see search terms most frequently used by other shoppers on eBay, in most any category or subcategory. This handy eBay keyword tool also does the same for search phrases you enter yourself, spanning across all eBay categories, returning similar and related terms used by live eBayers cruising around the marketplace.
You'll see that we make it easy to browse through subcategories, re-run searches based on newly found terms, and also easily jump over to our Most Watched search tool (or eBay) for interesting finds.
The development of this tool comes right on the heels of eBay's retiring of their heralded eBay Pulse pages. We wanted to offer a replacement for the same tool that was featured on Pulse for so many years, and we feel we did a pretty good job of it (actually, we've got a few bells and whistles that Pulse didn't have).
We hope you enjoy this new search functionality we've just brewed on the site and, as always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions.

eBay Removes Wildcard Searching

Earlier this month (05-Nov-2012, to be exact), eBay removed the ability to search their marketplaces using an asterisk within search terms. This wildcard functionality, as it's called, allowed a search for dress*, for example, to return results that included dress, dresser, dresses, etc.
eBay has stated that the asterisk character will no longer be supported, whether on-eBay or off-eBay. Thus, this change also affects their entire third-party developers platform, including WatchCount.com search queries and related services, and is unfortunately out of our control.
Search phrases that include a wildcard will now simply drop the asterisk and proceed without it. eBay still plans to process search queries with intelligent recognition to attempt to interpret the intent of the user and return relevant results. But know that if you use an asterisk, you may no longer receive results the way you're used to.
There's been a lot of discussion about this revolutionary change, some of which can be found in eBay's Search forum. eBay has said that as part of their search engine evolution, they needed to replace that functionality with a different internal algorithm for processing/interpreting and rewriting search requests by users.
As we said earlier, this affects search products on WatchCount.com, such as our No Bids, Auctions Ending Soon search tool.
Our flagship Most Watched search tool: it seems that wildcards may still work there for the time being, but we're not entirely sure. Play around with it and see what you think!

eBay Retires Pulse Pages

It seems eBay has dropped support for its Pulse pages, effective a few weeks ago. While to our knowledge eBay made no public announcement, a number of bloggers and observers took notice of the change, whereby the Pulse pages for eBay's major international sites disappeared, replaced with an automatic redirect to the eBay home page.
Pulse had been around for at least a decade, probably more. It's likely that eBay's removal of it was part of an "out with the old, in with the new" strategy that's currently underway on the site, evident by their high-publicity announcements of their new logo, homepage, and overall shopping experience advances.
Many feel that eBay Pulse maintained a kind of gravity for a certain "underground" audience of eBayers – a mix of buyers, sellers, and other enthusiasts, stretching back to the early years of eBay. The Pulse pages highlighted popular search phrases, most watched items, and popular eBay Stores, giving users a kind of glimpse of what was hot on eBay from a handful of angles.
For nearly half a decade now, WatchCount.com has been happily offering eBay Most Watched Items/Auctions search functionality that we liked to think was something akin to "Pulse on a turbo boost", as we're able to show more detailed ranking information with more depth and search features than what Pulse touched upon.
We hope and expect to continue offering these eBay Most Watched search services (as well as other features on the site), hopefully for years to come, and invite eBayers who were once regulars to Pulse to come explore all that WatchCount.com has to offer for eBay shoppers, sellers, and others.

Larger Photos for Most Watched Items

We've just boosted the photo image sizes for listings appearing on our Most Watched items pages. Pictures are now about 50% larger!
We think this change is a little easier on the eyeballs, and we hope you too enjoy more eye-catching moments as you browse the listings on our website.
Please reach out to us with any comments or suggestions you may have on this update (or anything else on our site). There's a Contact Us link in the 'About' menu on every page...
Thanks for using WatchCount.com!

New YouTube Video: eBay Auctions Ending Soon, No Bids

We've just published a short YouTube video that quickly explains how our Last-Minute eBay Deals search tool works. If you haven't ever searched for eBay auctions ending soon without bids, give our search tool a whirl, and you might score an overlooked eBay bargain! ...Or, you can see our uber-low-budget video here on YouTube.

WP Plugin: Milestone – Topping 4,000 Downloads

The WatchCount.com WordPress Plugin just hit another milestone today, surpassing its 4,000^th download. (Rockin'!) This is a total count since our free plugin launched over 2 years ago.
The WCCWPPI (as we call it) is hosted at, and tracked independently by, WordPress.org. You can see their download graph and counter for our plugin on the official WordPress Plugin Directory website.
If you use our WordPress plugin, we'd like to extend a big thank you for contributing to the master download tally, and we hope you're enjoying using the WCCWPPI to showcase your favorite eBay items within your blog.