Buying Desktop Programmer -- Ebay Project

Hi there,

I'm looking for someone to develop a desktop application for ebay product analysis. The application will essentially scrape completed listings based on my keywords, and provide an analysis of the results -- % of sold products, avg price of sold goods, etc. It can also be customized to include results only from a certain country, and only in "new" condition.

If this application works well, the application will be expanded to scrape data off another website, automatically search based on the keywords scraped on the other site, and also automatically compare cost->avg. sale price -- finally outputting a list of feasible products.

There really isn't much else to tell beyond what's listed here, so please PM me with approximate prices and also an estimated completion time.

 

I'm from Australia -- so obviously it all has to work with eBay Australia!

The following is what a typical search results look like when you type in "iphone" and select the category "Mobile Phones": http://phones.shop.ebay.com.au/items...1QQ_sacatZ3312

On the left, you'll notice that there are other options, including: Completed Listings Only, Items from Australia Only, etc. What I need is an application that is fairly customizable with its scraping -- I type in a keyword, it then scrapes the completed listings. I also want it customizable, so as I can select a category (this is all plausible through eBay's regular navigation) if I want, or Australia Only if I want.

It then needs to generate some sort of report based on this -- highest price of completed sales and its description, lowest price of completed sales and its description, avg. price of completed sales, % of successful sales and avg # of successful sales per day.

Successful sales are shown in green on the completed listings page, and unsuccessful sales are shown in red. For now, as I've stated, I'm only interested in the successful listings.

So -- to stick with the theme of an iPhone:
I search "iphone" in the ebay program, and I can then select a category (I need to narrow it down so I include only iphones, and not the accessories for them) and I can select Australia only (as obviously there's quite a lot of things coming from Hong Kong which are illegitimate and are irrelevant to the information I need). It generates a report.

Here's our hypothetical 5 listings over, say, 2 days:
599.95 (sold)
650 (unsold)
610 (sold)
550 (sold)
570 (sold)

The program will interpret that they are sold obviously by the colour of the price (green = sold, red = did not sell). It will then calculate:
Avg Price of Successful sales = 599.95 + 610 + 550 + 570 / 4.

The rest should be fairly self-explanatory!

 

Hey James_P, I think I would definitely be interested in working on this for you! I'll be sending you a PM shortly.

I do have one thing I'd like to note: lets say I type in iPhone like you said, in the listings it will come up with everything from the actual iPhone to car chargers, headsets, cases/covers, adapters, cables, etc. If I follow just your directions directly, those items will be factored into the average price. I'm not an avid ebay user, and from what I can do, I don't think it would entirely be easy to filter those out; I could do this by using pre-existing keywords such as excluding items that include words like 'headset', and/or you could limit the price range; though in either case it's not a perfect way of filtering out anything but just the iPhone.

And oh, first of all, I'd be able to make a Windows Application for you in C# or C++. Would that be fine, and which would you prefer? The C# app would require you to have the .Net library I believe, the C++ would be a standalone app.

The Completed Listings option can only be done by a logged-in user; I originally thought of just setting up a pre-existing account for you, but I figured it'd be easier to just prompt you for your login information at program startup (and your info can be saved in an encrypted file so you don't constantly have to re-enter it every time). This info will only be used to do the search, and will not allow the person using this program to do anything else (in case someone else gets access to the program if you have your info saved).

______
So here's how the program could be layed out: +Window Pops up prompting Login-info (if it detects saved info it will prompt you if you want to use that user info, though it'll only show your email, not your saved password for security reasons) +Program scraps Ebay to detect the various search options and populates a dropdown list that you select from. +There will be various search boxes to provide you with the advanced ebay search options, such as price range, besides a search box with the keyword you want to search for. +Hit search and program logs into ebay (if you have the Completed listings option selected) and it will scrape through every page your Ebay search result brings up for the pricing info, totaling it up +After it has gone through all of the pages it generates a report (and log if you want) based on your search criteria
______

Also a note, in the case Ebay changes how their page is laid out may cause the scraper to break and need slight modification to how it's scraping the pages; in the case this happens I will be more than happy to modify the program to work with Ebay's current changes. This may cost a small service fee, or can be included with the original price to include free "upgrades"/modifications. Also, are you buying just the final product or do you want all of the source code that went into the development of this as well?

So what do you think, sounds like a plan?

So yeah, obviously I've already been looking into your job, and I think I should be able to do this for you

I haven't worked on this type of app in a while so it's going to be hard to give you an exact estimate, but lets say it'll take me at most about a week. Um, for now if you want tell me what you think is reasonable and/or what you would like to pay me for the job; I can give you an hourly wage at which I'd like to work and when I'm done have an approximation of how long it took me to get the job done.

I'm also wondering how the payment process is going to work. I'm fine with Paypal, but I don't want to hand you the product and have you run away without paying me; when I show you the "final" product I'll give you a version of it rigged to expire after a day/after a certain number of tries/to delete itself after a single use (I haven't determined how I'm going to rig it up to make sure I don't get cheated out of being paid for my work as there are various measures to get around them depending on what type of person you are). After being paid I'll give you the complete version with no strings attached as well as the source code. Just trying to practice safe business measures, hope you understand; let me know what you think, and if you do hire me, we'll finalize how we're going to do this.

Thanks for your time, and I most certainly do look forward to hearing back from you, this should be a nice little fun project for me (Sending you a PM now)