I am rather new to the R/C world. I actually got started after reading a lot of material here and wanting to build my own drone. So while researching my first scratch built flying machine (a 450 Trex) I found Hobby King. Oh the cheapness... But the backorders are killer. Furthermore their customer support is not helpful at all with the backorders.
So I built hobbyking-watch.com. Basically, I scrape the inventory data for all hobby king products nightly. Then I chart it. So if you want to know if the product you are looking at is a sell out risk, hobbyking-watch.com can answer that. If you want to know if a product will be back in stock soon, it can try to answer that as well.
For example: the NX-4006-530kv Brushless Quad Motor. Which is my #2 organic search term. Apparently a lot of frustrated quad people out there. And I can see why, its woefully out of stock and has been that way as long as I have been tracking the product.
Another example: the 9x transmitter. many people recommend it, I wanted it (before I said screw it and bought a DX8). However it seems that it is very hard to get. The international warehouse has not been restocked as long as I have been tracking. The US warehouse has been restocked twice, selling out the same day.
Anyway, I am interested to know what you guys think. If you have feature ideas or find bugs please hit me up.
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looks like the site has been updated in months, what happened ???
I snagged a 9X on the evening of April 12, and it still showed as in stock the next morning. It did finally sell out though...
This sucks if you need/want everything right now. But by just placing my orders (sometimes having even multiple in the queue) I got everything I needed, including 9x and hard to get plush escs.
HK has trained me well and it seems normal that my money is taken ad the order might sit in queue for weeks ;)
You can backorder the 9X from the US warehouse. You're never going to get one otherwise, they sell out within minutes every time they get any in.
Hobbyking already has an email notification feature, but a lot of stuff sells out so quick that even with email notification you can't get parts.
Don't know how useful your site is, but it looks nice and it seems you've got great scraping skills!
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How about scraping this forum and moving it to a usable platform?