The Problem We Built This to Solve
If you've ever tried to buy a popular Pokémon TCG product at retail price in the UK, you already know the pain. A new set launches, ETBs sell out within hours, and by the time you check the Argos website on your lunch break everything says unavailable. You start a routine: refresh Argos at 7am, check Smyths at 8am, scan Amazon at 9am, peek at GAME before bed. Multiply that across a dozen retailers and it becomes a part-time job nobody asked for.
Restocks do happen, regularly. The issue isn't supply. It's timing. Products go live and sell out in a narrow window, sometimes as short as 15 minutes for high-demand items. If you're not checking the right retailer at the right moment, you miss it. Then you're waiting another week or two for the next wave, running the same manual checks and hoping for better luck.
That's the problem Poké Tracker exists to solve. Instead of you checking retailers, we check them for you and tell you the moment something changes.
How We Monitor Stock
Poké Tracker continuously monitors product pages across 15+ major UK retailers including Argos, Smyths, GAME, Amazon UK, John Lewis, Chaos Cards, Total Cards, and more. We check each product frequently throughout the day, looking for changes in availability.
When a product transitions from out of stock to in stock, we detect it and fire off alerts immediately. There's no batch processing or hourly digest. When stock appears, you know about it in real time. The system runs around the clock, including early mornings and weekends, because restocks don't wait for business hours.
We monitor both online availability and, where possible, click-and-collect stock. The goal is simple: by the time you receive an alert and open the retailer's website, the product should still be available for you to buy.
Free vs Premium
Poké Tracker offers both a free tier and a premium subscription, because we believe everyone should have access to basic stock tracking regardless of budget.
Free Tier
The free tier gives you access to the stock tracker dashboard, where you can browse current availability across all monitored retailers. You can see which products are in stock right now, compare prices, and click through to buy. It's a useful starting point and genuinely helpful if you check in regularly.
Premium
Premium is for collectors who don't want to miss a single restock. Subscribers get:
- Instant push notifications — alerts sent directly to your phone or browser the moment stock is detected, so you don't need to have the site open
- Full retailer coverage — priority monitoring across all 15+ retailers with the fastest possible detection times
- Discord alerts — real-time stock notifications posted to our premium Discord channels, including retailer-specific and product-specific feeds
- Watchlist — save specific products you're hunting and only receive alerts for the things you actually care about
- Notification preferences — control which retailers, products, and categories trigger alerts so you're not overwhelmed
The premium tier exists to keep the service running and developing. We're a small, independent team and subscription revenue is what funds the infrastructure, monitoring costs, and ongoing development.
Setting Up Alerts
Getting started takes a couple of minutes.
Create an account on Poké Tracker using your email. Free accounts get immediate access to the stock tracker dashboard.
Browse products through the tracker or the expansions pages. Find the products you want to follow, whether that's ETBs, booster bundles, tins, or anything else you're after.
Add to your watchlist. Each product has an option to add it to your personal watchlist. This tells the system what you care about so alerts are relevant to you, not just a firehose of every restock across every retailer.
Configure notifications. Head to your account settings to choose how you want to be notified: push notifications, Discord, or both. You can also filter by retailer if you only want alerts from specific shops.
Once that's done, you're set. Carry on with your day and let the alerts come to you.
The Community
Poké Tracker isn't just a tool. There's a growing community of UK collectors behind it. Our Discord server is where collectors share tips, discuss new sets, and help each other find stock. There are channels for general chat, set-specific discussion, and local stock sightings where members report what they've seen on shelves at their nearest Smyths or Argos.
The community aspect matters because no automated system catches everything. Sometimes a member spots an unadvertised restock in-store, or a lesser-known retailer gets a surprise allocation. Those tips spread through the Discord faster than any bot could find them.
What's Coming Next
We're actively working on new features to make stock tracking even more useful. Without over-promising on timelines, here's what's on the roadmap:
- Price history — see how product prices have changed over time across retailers, so you can tell whether today's price is genuinely good or worth waiting on
- Restock patterns — aggregated data on when specific retailers tend to restock, helping you anticipate drops before they happen
- Expanded retailer coverage — we're continually adding new retailers as the UK TCG retail landscape evolves
We're building Poké Tracker for the same reason we use it: collecting Pokémon cards in the UK shouldn't require refreshing six websites before breakfast. If you've got ideas for features you'd find useful, the Discord is the best place to tell us.