The must-have app this holiday season tells you when the PS5 is back in stock
BY IRINA IVANOVA

If the hottest gadget this holiday season is a PlayStation 5, the second is the humble product tracker. Much lower-profile than the flashy tech gadgets they track, these apps and websites, which number over a dozen, trawl retail websites to let shoppers know when high-demand items are back in stock at a retailer.

The lineup includes new and well-known websites, such as NowInStock, StockInformer, zooLert, Octoshop, FastAlerts and camelcamelcamel, as well as an army of Twitter bots.

Leading them is HotStock, a UK-based app that locates popular products like gaming consoles and graphics cards. Downloads of HotStock in the U.S. doubled from October to November of this year, according to App Annie, a mobile data and analytics provider.

These apps, which largely rely on automated technology, are closely competing with human product trackers who get tips from warehouse workers, website trackers or companies themselves, and the most successful of whom have built followings of a million.

"We're in uncharted territory," said Matt Swider, a technology reporter whose full-time job these days is tracking gaming consoles on his ultra-popular Twitter account. "Not even the retailers have a good system set up in order to tell people, 'Hey, we have this in stock.'"

Dash for a stash

Product trackers are rising to prominence amid a perfect storm: A holiday season with scads of "must-have" electronics and toys is bogged down by shipping delays just as consumers are ready to spend at record levels. The shipping delays and related supply-chain snarls are expected to last well into 2022.

"Anyone who has anything on a container ship is in a big world of hurt right now," Rick Watson, an ecommerce consultant, told CBS MoneyWatch. "If you have a toy that's on a ship and it gets here two months too late you might as well burn it. Your kids are going to be upset, you're not going to get full price for that product."

While this holiday season is far from the first time a hot toy or electronic game was unavailable, it's unusual in how erratically stocked those items can be, Watson said. In previous years, items tended to get sold out everywhere at roughly the same time. This year, businesses are trying different strategies to get holiday-season goods through shipping gridlock, Watson said.

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