eBay Hacks

Automatically Keep Track of Auctions You’ve Sold

Retrieve and store completed auction data without typing.

As explained in [Hack #65], it’s vital for every seller to keep permanent, off-site records of every single auction he or she has sold.

This script, when run every day at the same time (as described in [Hack #17]), does it all:

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

$today = &formatdate(time);
$yesterday = &formatdate(time - 86400);

my $page_number = 1;
PAGE:
while (1) {
    my $rsp = call_api({ Verb => 'GetSellerList',
                  DetailLevel => 8,
                       UserId => $user_id,
                  EndTimeFrom => $yesterday,
                    EndTimeTo => $today,
                   PageNumber => $page_number
    });

    if ($rsp->{Errors}) {
      print_error($rsp);
      last PAGE;
    }
    foreach (@{$rsp->{SellerList}{Item}}) {
      my %i = %$_;
      ($id, $enddate, $title, $currency, $price, $highbidder) =
             @i{qw/Id EndTime Title CurrencyId CurrentPrice HighBidder/};

      if (! -e "$localdir/$id") {       
        open (OUTFILE,">$localdir/$id");
          print OUTFILE "[Details]\n";
          print OUTFILE "enddate=$enddate\n";
          print OUTFILE "itemnumber=$id\n";
          print OUTFILE "title=$title\n";
          print OUTFILE "price=$currency$price\n";
          print OUTFILE "bidder=".$highbidder->{User}{UserId}."\n";
          print OUTFILE "bidderemail=".$highbidder->{User}{Email}."\n";
        close (OUTFILE);
      }
    }
    last PAGE unless $rsp->{SellerList}{HasMoreItems};
    $page_number++;
}

This script works similarly to the one in [Hack #85], but it retrieves a list of auctions by seller that have ended between the specified dates. Here are a few important things to note about ...