Tracking eBay auctions

These days I find myself buying all sorts of things off of ebay.

The problem I have found in the past is that I cannot keep track of the items I am bidding on, and then forget about them, consequently ending up with nothing.

I set out to find a FREE method of tracking eBay auctions. An application that allows you to snipe would be good too.

My first port of call was freshmeat.net, where I found:

• BidNobble – This piece of software looked great, however I soon find out that it doesn’t actually work correctly.
• eBay Agent – This was a nice application written in Perl, which could be run from a server however with no decent frontend.
• bidwatcher – This application was okay, the problem was it was slow, and this didn’t work properly either.
• Bid Monkey – Written in python, I tried this, I didn’t like it at all.
• JBidwatcher – Another java based Bit watcher, that is very poorly designed, and difficult to work with.

I crawled the internet for other applications out there, only to find they don’t REALLY exist.

In the end the best thing I found was a Google Gadget for Google Desktop called eBay Auction Watch. This plug-in is fantastic, its just a shame you’re forced to use it with Google Desktop considering it uses so much system resources.