OT: eBay categories

OMIGAWD! YOU POSTED WITHOUT POSTING THE MESSAGES YOU WERE POSTING TO! HOW ARE WE GOING TO KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT! WATCH OUT! NETNANNY Dave Hinz IS GOING TO BE ON YOU LIKE FLIES ON ................

Steve

You forgot. Then they post a "gloat" here.

Steve

In my experience, attempting to contact eBay about anything whatsoever is a waste of time and an exercise in frustration. They have never sent me a considered and helpful response.

Chris

plonk me too, please

(top posted for your convenience) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Keep the whole world singing . . . . DanG (remove the sevens) snipped-for-privacy@7cox.net

time

If the rest of your advice is like your understanding of time zones Good luck.

5PM pacific is 8PM eastern (not exactly afternoon) :-) ...lew...

I don't know what the markup is on Snap-On tools but I figured it was less than half retail.

What is your Ebay seller's name?

Mike

Still waiting for your cites.

Gunner

The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose and for someone else to pay when things go wrong.

In the past few decades, a peculiar and distinctive psychology has emerged in England. Gone are the civility, sturdy independence, and admirable stoicism that carried the English through the war years . It has been replaced by a constant whine of excuses, complaints, and special pleading. The collapse of the British character has been as swift and complete as the collapse of British power.

Theodore Dalrymple,

Yeah, I asked too, and he seems to be ashamed to tell us or something.

The man does something financially intelligent, and you have to attach emotional values to it. What are you, 13 year olds, or have you been watching Oprah too much?

What in the world do you want his ebay ID for? ......... never mind. I'm sure you would come up with some adolescent pranks. Just be careful. New laws go into effect regarding harassment.

The "or something" the man is doing is keeping you away from the means he uses to make money. Something mature adults would do. But you don't understand or comprehend that, do you?

I thought not.

Steve, who's 4 sales shy of 1,000 and knows why he isn't posting his ebay identity for the entertainment of morons.

You know, I just assumed they were asking to add another name to the "do not bid" list. What's moronic or adolescent about that?

er

Yeah, that was my goal; I don't bid on auctions where the sellers play bullshit games (like, when the conditions of sale are longer than the description of the item, or when they keyword spam) so I'd probably not buy anything from him anyway, but it's always good to programatically ignore known useless entities.

How do you programmatically ignore a seller? I would love to do that.

i

I'll let you know. I'd bet there's a firefox extension for it. If there's not, there might be a really good project.

Thanks. I wrote a perl module for accessing eBay called Net::eBay.

It is mentioned here

It is a module and a set of scripts that could be used by websites, or by people like me who prefer to list stuff from command line.

One of the new scripts that I added is a search script, it is new, bt I could add some blocking function to it.

i

You never fail to surprise me with the diversity of your interests.

I'll check that out, it may save me some annoyance. I'd rather use command line than web interface for script-able things like "here's 50 of all the same kind of thing, read the description and set the rest to (this)".

So their API is fairly reasonable, or are you using curl or wget or something and parsing that way?

It is perfect for listing high volume of similar stuff.

You could, for example, automate your work to the point that insert your coin into a scanner, and type something like

list-coin-on-ebay.pl 3.99 Sterling Silver Coin yada yada

and the script would scan a picture, create HTML, upload images to your server, etc, and list on ebay.

Net::eBay's role here would be to submit the auction to eBay, the rest of scripting you would need to do yourself. I sell my own stuff with something similar. I take pictures, run a script to get them from CompactFlash memory, edit them using xv, type description text, and then run a prepare script. It would create HTML, add legal disclaimers, make thumbnails, and upload stuff to server. Then I would call AddItem script, give it category, starting price, title etc and it would submit the item to ebay.

Their API is very nice actually, very powerful and complete EXCEPT they do not provide bidding functionality. (they actually do provide it if you solemnly swear that it will not be used for sniping, but alas, that's what I need it for)

i

I'm going to look at that, and possibly (too many interests, already!) contribute something to it. :)

er

That would be great! It's relatively new (2 months old), but some people wrote to me saying that they are using it.

i