Price watch: get told when an item drops to your price
A watch in Atta is a price target or a back-in-stock wait on one product. The price is checked hourly, and when it crosses your target you get one notification. It tells you; it doesn't buy. The button on a met watch asks the agent to buy, and that purchase goes through the normal approval rules.
Saving a watch
Tell the agent which product and what price.
Sam, in chat: watch the 27-inch monitor from the first result, tell me when it's under $240
Atta: Watching it. It's $279.00 now. I'll tell you when it's $240.00 or less.
A watch is a target price or a wait for stock on one product, and optionally one variant. The price at the moment you save it is kept as the starting price and never updated. Saving a new target for the same watch resets its state.
How often it checks
An hourly schedule reads the watches, oldest check first, 200 per run. Each watch reads the product once, from the connected store or from the open web page it came from. Every read is stamped whether it worked or not, so one broken product can't sit at the head of the queue forever.
Two cases are skipped. A product from a store linked to someone's own browser isn't checked, because an unattended job never drives a shopper's signed-in session. A price in a different currency from the watch is never compared or recorded.
You're told once per crossing
When the price meets the target and the watch hasn't already fired, you get a notification and the watch is marked met. While the price stays under the target, it stays quiet. When it rises above the target, the mark clears, so the next drop notifies again.
The notification key includes the watch and the time it was met. If a run is retried, the same notification isn't sent twice.
| Check | Price | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Saved | $279.00 | Starting price stored |
| Hour 6 | $259.00 | Nothing, still above $240.00 |
| Hour 31 | $238.00 | Met: one notification |
| Hour 32 | $238.00 | Quiet, already met |
| Hour 55 | $255.00 | Mark cleared |
| Hour 80 | $229.00 | Met again: one notification |
The notification arrives in the bell inbox, in the reader's language, and by email according to their notification settings: per-kind switches, instant or daily, muted workspaces.
The watchlist page
The /watchlist page shows each item with the change since the watch was set, the amount left to the target and when it was last checked. You can filter by met, cheaper or stock, and sort by newest, biggest drop as a share of the starting price, or closest to the target.
A met watch has a button that asks the agent to buy it. Any other watch's button asks what the item costs now. Neither buys anything by itself. The first one starts a request in chat, and it goes through the same approval policy as any other purchase: the amount against the person's limit, the budget, and the approval chain if the amount needs one.
Why it doesn't buy
The alert is information. A purchase is a separate decision that has to pass the approval policy at the time it's made, with the price, the budget and the person's limit as they are then. If you want the item, the watch is one message away from a request.
Private chats
A watch saved from a private chat is private too. The money figures stay visible in the budget, but the item doesn't show to other members.
See tail spend for how small purchases flow after the alert.
Questions
Will Atta buy the item when the price drops?
No. It notifies you. If you want it, the button on a met watch asks the agent to buy, and that goes through your approval rules like any other purchase.
How often are prices checked?
Hourly. Each run checks the watches with the oldest last check first, up to 200 per run.
Will I get a notification every hour while the price is low?
No. You're notified once when the price crosses your target. If it goes back above and drops again, you're notified again.
Can I be told when something is back in stock?
Yes. A watch can be a back-in-stock wait instead of a price target.
Related
- Tail spend management for small, frequent purchasesTail spend is the long run of small purchases nobody sources. Atta takes them in chat, applies your approval rules and keeps a record for each one.
- Purchase approval softwareSet approval limits per role and build approval chains by amount. Approvers answer from Slack, WhatsApp or the app, and nothing is paid until the last step clears.