eBay Hacks

Retrieve Details About an Auction

Use the GetItem API call to get listing details.

The GetItem API call is used to retrieve all the details of a listing, including the title, description, starting price, category, and about 180 other individual bits of information.

Here’s a simple script that, when provided with the item number, returns the title, seller ID, amount of time left, number of bids, and the current price.

#!/usr/bin/perl
require 'ebay.pl';

$item_id = shift @ARGV or die "Usage: $0 itemnumber";

my $rsp = call_api({ Verb => 'GetItem',     [1]
              DetailLevel => 0,
                       Id => $item_id
});

if ($rsp->{Errors}) {
  print_error($rsp)
} else {
  my %i = %{$rsp->{Item}[0]};
my ($price, $currency, $bids, $time_left, $seller, $title) =     [2]
         @i{qw/CurrentPrice CurrencyId BidCount TimeLeft Seller Title/};

$d = $time_left->{Days};     [3]
  $h = $time_left->{Hours};
  $m = $time_left->{Minutes};
  $s = $time_left->{Seconds};
  $seller_id = $seller->{User}{UserId};
  $seller_fb = $seller->{User}{Feedback}{Score};
  
  print "Item #$item_id: $title\n";
  print "For sale by $seller_id ($seller_fb)\n";
  print "Currently at $currency$price, $bids bids\n";
  
  if ($d > 0) { print "$d days, $h hours left.\n"; }
  elsif ($h > 0) { print "$h hours, $m minutes left.\n"; }
  elsif ($s > 0) { print "$m minutes, $s seconds left.\n"; }
  else { print "auction ended.\n"; }
}

This script is fairly straightforward. The GetItem API call is submitted on line [1], and the desired fields are extracted on line [2]. Naturally, you can specify any of the ...