Under the hood
How Squishy Scout knows what's in stock
No guesswork and no scraped rumours: every stock state on the site comes from a reading we took ourselves, stamped with the moment we took it. Here's how those readings happen.
Three steps
- 1
You heart it
Build your Squish List from the catalog in a couple of taps.
- 2
We re-check it
Continuously — hot items every couple of minutes on Pro.
- 3
You get the alert
Push and email with the price, the shop and a buy link.
Where the readings come from
Boutique shops
Independent squishy shops publish a live product feed. We read it directly, which is fast, free and exact — down to the units left on small-batch drops.
Big-box marketplaces
Target, Walmart and Amazon are read through paid retail data APIs, sampled from four regional hubs because they answer differently depending on where you're shopping from.
Stores without a feed
Chains like Michaels and American Eagle are read by fetching the product page itself and parsing the shop's own availability markup — including a re-check of pages we already know about, not just search.
Shelf stock
Where a chain publishes per-branch pickup or shelf counts, we ask by ZIP so the Local tab can sort real branches by distance.
What each stock label means
- In stock
The shop can ship it right now. This is the only state we'll fire an instant alert for.
- In store only
It's on a shelf or pickup-ready at a branch, but not shippable. Useful if you're local, misleading if we called it “in stock” — so we don't.
- Unconfirmed
The listing hasn't been re-read inside its normal window, or the shop gave an answer we couldn't trust. We'd rather say we don't know than send you on a wasted trip.
- Sold out
Checked recently and genuinely gone. It stays on the product page, greyed at the bottom, so you know who normally stocks it.
How often we re-check
Scan budget is finite, so it goes where it does the most good. That's exactly why we track squishies and squeeze toys only — no plush, slime or candy soaking up checks.
- • Flash-tier drops from the hottest brands: about every two minutes
- • Watched and recently-restocked listings: every few minutes to hourly
- • Everything else in the catalog: a full pass on a rolling schedule
- • Listings sitting way over retail: deliberately slower — they don't sell out fast
- • Free plan stock reads refresh every 6 hours; Scout Pro shows the live state from every pass
How alerts reach you
- • Push notification the moment a watched listing flips to buyable (install the app to enable it on iPhone)
- • Email within a minute, with the price and a direct buy link
- • Free plan collects the same drops into a once-a-day digest and tracks 3 squishies; Pro tracks up to 200
- • Mute retailers you never buy from, or only be alerted when the price is near retail
- • Trade offers, replies and dispute outcomes notify you the same way
How we decide something is over retail
We cluster the prices every shop charges for the same squishy, throw out the outliers and take that as the going retail price — backed by hand-set line prices where a brand has a well-known price point. Anything above it gets a badge with the percentage over, plus how confident the baseline is. It's an estimate of the real-world price, not an official MSRP.
See it live
Free to start, Scout Pro from $9.99/mo — every new account gets a 14-day Pro preview, no card needed.