Help Wanted: Develop Ebay Inventory and Item Posting Application

[Catalyst159]

I looking for anyone who would be interested in working on developing an ebay application. Some functionality that the application will aim at is keeping item inventory and being able to post/sell an item for auction to your ebay account. I would definitely like to try to add the possibility for posting/selling items for auction in batchs, so multiple items can be added at once to your ebay account for selling in auctions. Any help would be greatly appreciated, and be an opportunity for those interested to collaborate and participate in a development project. Please let me know if you have an interest and would like to help with this collaborative effort. Thanks

Catalyst

[jvanegmond]

This a payed job?

What sort of things would the developer build? Everything?

[Catalyst159]

This a payed job?

What sort of things would the developer build? Everything?

No this is not a paying job. Its just an idea for a project. And if you ever seel items on ebay it could definitely improve selling productivity and help expedite the process of selling something on ebay. We would have to come up with a plan and strategy that we can use to approach the project. Would you be interested ? or know of anyone else who would be interested as well?

Catalyst

[SmOke_N]

This a payed job?

No this is not a paying job. Its just an idea for a project.

It's often beneficial to explain what it is you've done thus far, why it is you're wanting to do it, how it will benefit you as an individual, and if there is profit benefits from it that you're trying to achieve, how the individuals that wish to participate would be compensated.

[jvanegmond]

It's often beneficial to explain what it is you've done thus far, why it is you're wanting to do it, how it will benefit you as an individual, and if there is profit benefits from it that you're trying to achieve, how the individuals that wish to participate would be compensated.

Exactly. And I would like to add that I'd also like to see why you're not just developing this yourself. Are you lacking expertise in an area or are you just plain awful at programming? What will you bring to the table then? etc.

[Catalyst159]

Exactly. And I would like to add that I'd also like to see why you're not just developing this yourself. Are you lacking expertise in an area or are you just plain awful at programming? What will you bring to the table then? etc.

Well, I am just thought I would see if anyone else had an interest in doing something like this. I am going to continue to attempt it myself if no one shows any interest anyway. To be honest I am primarily a networking specialist, but I dabble in some scripting, and programming. I am probably most familiar with VB, vbs scripting, VBA, windows scripting, some javascript etc.. I thought that a project like this would also help me make some contacts within the autoit community and also be a learning experience as well.

Catalyst

[Sirmabus]

The optimal way would be to reverse engineer how the eBay site communicates with it's data base when you make related requests.

I haven't looked in detail but the site appears to be a lot of Java script.

There similar existing tools; to do automatic bidding, etc.

Google for them and if you are lucky you will find one that is open source that you can adapt for your needs.

[BrettF]

Reverse engineer. That doesn't sound smart.

http://developer.ebay.com/common/api/

Maybe a supplied API would do the job?

/sarcasm

[jvanegmond]

Reverse engineer. That doesn't sound smart.

http://developer.ebay.com/common/api/

Maybe a supplied API would do the job?

/sarcasm

Looks like the API can do it with the PlaceOffer call, but you need eBay approval. I'd really go for reverse engineering here since they probably don't want you to do this automated. Edited October 30, 2010 by Manadar

[Sirmabus]

Looks like the API can do it with the PlaceOffer call, but you need eBay approval. I'd really go for reverse engineering here since they probably don't want you to do this automated.

Great there it is.

Maybe no need to reverse anything then. But then "reverse engineering" is kind of a broad term.

Study the API first by all means and see if it there is facilities to do what you want to do.

Reminds me, I once had this idea for eBay (as I'm sure many others have):

Perhaps something that will scan the entire eBay data base (which might be impractical because of the sheer size).

You store some item information in your own data base to run queries on.

You'd want to have basic information like the type of product, final bidding price after an auction is over, the amount of bids, start prices vrs end etc.

The question you will ask of this process is "What is the most popular selling item(s) on eBay that are the cheapest to buy at whole sale?".

For you are trying to buy things low, and sell them high (at least enough to make profit anyhow).

Then maybe further break downs to add things like "..and which of these items are the least saturated by other sellers."

Some of the pieces of data might be to difficult, impractical, or even impossible to get.

For instance if you want to get the automated avg whole sale price of items maybe you can tap into online data bases.

But I don't see getting a real whole price for millions of different items.

At minimal might require some sort of logic/AI to make some smart assumptions about matching such things.

Would probably still take a lot of human intervention and analysis. Still might be very useful as a tool to provide at least part of the answer.

Edited October 31, 2010 by Sirmabus