Been tracking Target's Pokémon TCG restock patterns for a while now, sharing what I've learned:

Target doesn't announce restocks. Unlike some retailers, there's no public calendar. Product just appears — sometimes online first, sometimes in-store first, sometimes both within minutes of each other.

Online drops usually move faster than in-store. Bots hit the website within seconds of inventory updating. If you're refreshing the page manually, you're already behind. In-store restocks give you slightly more breathing room since foot traffic is the bottleneck, not scripts.

Overnight stocking is the pattern to watch. A lot of Target locations push new pallets overnight, meaning early morning (6-9am local) is when in-store shelves often get refreshed before the rest of the store notices.

Third-party 'in stock' trackers are often stale. Many aggregator sites pull from APIs that lag by minutes — which is an eternity when product sells out in under 60 seconds.

The only thing that's consistently worked for us is a dedicated alert pipeline that pings the second inventory flips, not a periodic scraper. That's basically why we built PokéPing — happy to share more on the setup if anyone's curious.

Curious what's worked (or hasn't) for others hunting restocks — drop your experience below.