What's The Most Popular ____ on Right Now ?

We've posted our Terms of Service (<< click to read) that all visitors agree to abide by when using our site and services.

We've taken some of the most requested new features for our site and collected them together on our new Advanced Search page.

This year we'd gotten a number of requests to allow deep searches, and you can now do just that: you can see the most watched items in a specific eBay category, such as Musical Instruments > Guitar > Electric > Gibson. As usual, you can combine such searches with keywords, and you'll see Watch Counts for all such search results, as you've come to expect here on WatchCount.com.

The most requested new feature was more search results, so we've added that within Advanced Search as well. You can now pull up the 40, 60, or even 100 most watched/popular items for your specified category or keyword query. Sweet.

Moreover, you can also search multiple categories at once, and even exclude categories, such as if you wanted to see the most popular Harry Potter items outside of the Books category.

If you're an eBay seller or service provider and occasionally come across an eBay category number in your notes but forget what it is, you can quicly look it up on our Advanced Search page by dropping it into the Included Categories box.

Are we as good as, or even better than, the Most Watched section of eBay's Pulse page? Maybe, maybe not, depending on your criteria. But either way, we hope you'll find these new features helpful, whether you're shopping on eBay or doing market research.

As always, our door is open if you have any questions, discover any bugs, or have any comments to share.

--Jake

We've just made a small textual (and coloring) change to the WatchCount.com Widget: We've revised the default informational text from "eBayers" to "eBay users". (Not everyone knows what an eBayer is!) This went into effect for all current/live and new Widgets.

As always, if you like you can modify the informational text to say almost anything. Simply follow our customization instructions. If that's too much HTML to swallow at one sitting, feel free to shoot us an email and we can whip up the customized HTML snippit for you.

--Jake

At long last... I'm excited that we've just added a new feature to our site. Until now, to see most watched/popular eBay items you needed to specify a keyword phrase or category on our search page.

No longer.

Simply by omitting any keywords phrase and category selection, you can now see the most watched items across an entire eBay site! The results are nearly identical to eBay Pulse, so you can get Watch Count data easily for those top-level Pulse items you've been curious about, and the few runners-up that don't quite make the cut onto Pulse but are still heavily watched.

This feature works for each of the eBay international sites we currently support. Note that eBay considers its US Motors site distinctly separate from the main eBay.com site, so most-watched for eBay.com won't take into consideration any super-popular cars and trucks. (By contrast, other eBay countries' vehicle items are included within their respective sites, so you'll often see some at the top of that country's most watched list in our search results.) If you want to see the most popular eBay Motors (US) items, just select the "Motors" category while in the eBay US mode of our site.

--Jake

We just finished adding another free tool to WatchCount.com: the Dynamic Watch This Item Link. I know it'll save a bunch of sellers a bunch of time.

As you may know, encouraging shoppers to add your item to their Watch Lists can bring them that much closer to the item: they're reminded of the item in their My eBay page; eBay emails them just before the listing ends; if the item is relisted, eBay sends another email. (There's even some speculation, and perhaps evidence, that a higher Watch Count can improve your item's placement in Best Match search results.) Can't hurt, right?

If you're seeing under 20 watchers on your item but getting no bids, you've probably learned the hard lesson that "watchers doesn't equal buyers" — at least in that under-two-dozen range. Once you break past 20-30 watchers it becomes much more likely that you'll be getting at least that first bid, probably more. Can getting more watchers lead to more bids? Maybe.

To encourage watchers, as a seller you may already be manually adding Watch Links to your listings. You know how cumbersome it is to have to revise the listing immediately after posting, else your custom Watch Link with flashy graphic or in-your-face font size won't actually do any good.

That's where our Dynamic Watch This Item Link comes in... It's a standard 1-shot URL you drop into any or all of your listings instead of a manually built Watch Link, and you don't need to revise the listing to complete the link. Pretty cool, eh? It dynamically detects your item and eBay country-site and forwards your visitor through a properly-built Watch Link when they click the link.

Additionally, you can customize the Dynamic WTI Link. For your purposes it's really just an HTML anchor tag that you'd flank around any text or image of your choosing (behind it is some clever software we wrote to do the magic :) .

If you're using our free Widget, you'll see the Link comes alongside it by default, adding a miniature "double-punch" to your marketing efforts for that listing.

--Jake

We'll soon be changing the standard WatchCount.com Widget skin from its current look to a new skin. This change will go into effect automatically on Wednesday, July 30, 2008 at 9:00 am PDT (eBay Time) and will affect all current/live Widgets in place on eBay pages, as well as new Widgets going forward. Exception: if you've customized your Widget to designate a certain skin, you'll continue to display your specified choice — the Widgets in your listings won't change their appearance when the general cutover happens.

If you're like most sellers who use our Widget, you won't need to make any adjustments anywhere or worry about anything; just sit back and enjoy a sleeker look. :-)

old default skin: "glass"
new default skin: "silver"

I think this new skin has a cleaner, brighter feel to it that hopefully will be embraced more easily by both sellers and buyers. Of course if you'd prefer the old skin, or any of our other ones, please check out our selection of skins and apply your choice in your own Widget. You can even get in contact with us if you're interested in getting a custom skin.

--Jake

We've just added a new skin, "silver", to our array of skins. If you're already customizing your WatchCount.com Widget, you can start using it right away as an alternative to the default skin. (If you haven't customized your Widget, it's easy. Instructions are here.)

--Jake

I'm really excited about a new add-on widget to our site that enables eBay sellers to display their item's Watch Count within the body of the listing(s). It's pretty cool: you just slap a simple piece of our HTML code (no Javascript, no Flash, no hassle) into your listing and when the page is viewed, the item's current Watch Count is shown (with some minor caveats).



While some sellers prefer to keep their items' Watch Counts hidden or below the radar, we know that other sellers feel that the display of a potent Watch Count value can possibly entice shopper interest and activity. Our Widget enables that figure to be exhibited publicly.

A Watch Count can be a measure of item popularity, not unlike user voting/flagging systems at social media sites (Digg.com, for example). A brief comparison of 3 eBay item popularity metrics is on our Widget FAQ.

There are customization options for the WatchCount.com Widget, such as the ability to have the Widget automatically hide itself for low Watch Counts, or additional skins to use.

It's all laid out, including the short HTML snippit to grab to implement the Widget, here.

--Jake

We're happy to announce that we've added 2 more countries to our growing list of supported international eBay sites. Visitors interested in researching popular items in eBay Canada (English) and eBay Australia can now do so here on our site.

--Jake

At long last we've finally upgraded the software behind WatchCount.com to handle international eBay sites. Now that that's taken care of we can begin to roll out international support country-by-country. This means that visitors can see the most popular eBay items (and their Watch Counts) at eBay sites 'round the planet — not just on eBay US.

Our first international eBay site is eBay UK. (Currently, most of our non-US visitors come from the UK, so we tackled that one first.) You can now see what items are ranked as most popular by eBay users on eBay.co.uk . Cool.

Keep an eye on the site/country selector pick-list for availability of more international eBay sites to come. And if you have a preferred eBay site you'd like to see included sooner rather than later, please let us know and we'll see what we can do.

And as always, if you come across any bugs, please give us a holler. Thanks!

--Jake

We think we've got all the kinks worked out of WatchCount.com for now, so it's time to pull out of beta mode and consider ourselves fully live. (Jeez, did you realize that Google's Gmail is still in beta?!)

There could still be a bug or two hidden in the corner, so if anything seems out of place, please do let us know.

Of course, there are several more features we'll be adding in the coming months, so stay tuned.

--Jake

We've just finished adding and testing a new feature on WatchCount.com : You can now search within the top-level eBay US Motors categories! Would you like to see the most watched car or truck on eBay? The most popular motorcycle? Now you can. And of course you can search with much greater detail by using the Keywords field as well, as usual.

You'll find these new eBay Motors categories (well, new for us) nestled within the category list on the WatchCount.com home page. What we've noticed is that these highly watched items accumulate many more watchers than most other eBay categories (check it out here); people seem to get pretty pumped up about buying vehicles on eBay! (Who would've thought?!)

--Jake

We're happy to report that a few days ago the good folks at eBay just gave us the nod by deeming WatchCount.com an 'eBay Compatible Application' after we passed their compatibility testing requirements. Our web application is now officially certified for use with the eBay Platform, and we've earned the right to display the eBay Compatible Application logo on our site. Yay!

--Jake

Ok, here we are on the new WatchCount.com official blog [edit: now converted to this News page]. Sweet.

I'm Jake, your host, and here's what WatchCount.com, just launched in beta this week, does:

At our site, you select (keywords and/or a general category) what you want to see on eBay and we'll show you the most popular items on eBay for your query at that very moment. Popularity is determined ultimately by eBay, but the items' Watch Counts are the primary factor — how many eBay users have clicked "Watch This Item" for that auction listing. We also show you the actual Watch Counts themselves, a metric currently unavailable on eBay. (Yes, it's all free.)

Whether you're an eBay buyer or seller, there are a number of reasons why the Watch Count / popularity information may prove helpful — see our FAQ for some examples.

We hope you enjoy the helpfulness and utility of our site.

--Jake