General Forum

Re: Tracking pricing - any technical/IT people

Medogsfat — Sat, 29 May 2010 08:19:14 GMT

As Mika has already mentioned it is extremely difficult due to the number of variables.

Quality of the listing & description, condition, listing category, whether it is collect only & time of auction ending - even if there is an important football game on at the time - can all affect the final sale price. The only sales with no variables as such are the "buy it now" ones but even these are subject to whether they have been under/overpriced. Many sellers simply don't know the "real" value & just stick a ridiculously low price on.

Chris.

Re: Tracking pricing - any technical/IT people

tournedos — Sat, 29 May 2010 07:04:11 GMT

Everything is possible in theory... I have actually stumbled upon a number of eBay "portals" while searching for something. They mostly simply echo the listings and I'm not sure what the point is, probably leeching advertising income.

But, the big but - I believe the amount of work needed would be immense. eBay pages are very complex and they can (and will) of course change them at any time without warning, so the parser would need to be complex as well and might require changes quite often.

Add to this the endless ways of mispelling and misnaming the products, differences between national eBay pages, etc, and I'm afraid implementing anything like this would be feasible only to eBay themselves, having direct access to the databases.

Good idea though - I try to achieve the same relying on my excellent memory

Tracking pricing - any technical/IT people

Calvin — Sat, 29 May 2010 04:34:09 GMT

Folks,

It dawned on me that, given the number of times people ask the prices of equipment, could we not make something that tracks market prices on eBay and the like? I'm thinking that you could have a tracker search engine type thing that logged the time and end price of an eBay sale that contained the term "Beomaster 6000" or the like went for. That way if you were looking to buy a piece of kit, you could just drag up a graph showing [1] how oftern the item turned up and [2] what sort of price it went for

This is a fairly technical piece of work but I'm sure we have some technical people here. Alas I know C, C++ and VBA (not Java or one of the net languages) but I'd have thought you'd just need to have a automatic search tool with a set list of items to track that ran once a week, given that auctions last 7 days. Thoughts?