Gathering ebay infos.

July 23, 2008 3:48 PM

cp /mnt/com/ebay/completed_auctions/ps3 ~/ps3.txt ??

I have the following pieces of information:

a. Search criteria
b. Date range.

And from this; I would like an Excel spreadsheet that has the following columns:

end price, end date, description, item #, seller, etc

Is there any way to do such a thing in an automated fashion without screen scraping myself?

posted by SirStan to computers & internet (6 answers total)

http://developer.ebay.com/common/api/
posted by xmutex at 4:00 PM on July 23, 2008

Is that supposed to be a link to an actual text file?
posted by junesix at 4:05 PM on July 23, 2008

Excel will do the scraping for you. Go to:

Data->Import External Data->New Web Query

you'll get a wee browserette to go to ebay and set up your search, then grab the little tab at the top left of the results page to grab all the details. Excel will ask where you want the results placed on the local workbook.

Looks like you'll need to go to advanced search on ebay and change your results-display options to get the item numbers - the other details should be shown/imported by default.
posted by pompomtom at 5:21 PM on July 23, 2008 [1 favorite]

Seconding Excel for this. The UI is awkward and it's got the usual MS-weirdness, but it will work, and since Excel is your destination, it's perfect.
posted by rokusan at 5:26 PM on July 23, 2008

I have written a utility to search completed eBay auctions and retrieve a bunch of data, including what you want, for a particular query, without paying to use the API. If the Excel option doesn't work for you, contact me and I'll tweak it and post it so you can use it.
posted by azazello at 8:52 PM on July 23, 2008

By the way, completed auctions are only listed on eBay for a limited time and some auctions may not show up in the completed auctions search for mysterious reasons.
posted by azazello at 8:54 PM on July 23, 2008