How do you build a website that compares products on CJ Amazon and Ebay that updates.

I am trying to build a website that updates automatically. It would take a products off eBay amazon and commission junction and compare them by price, and whatever I am able to come up with in the usability testing I am about to do. Is there an API for that. Does eBay provide a way to make a product description page.

Thank you

Noah

 

good luck with that. I don't think there is a straightforward way to do that.

 

I don't think so either. You'll probably have to create your own database and use the web service APIs that the three companies provide.

 

Yep, though it's a nice idea, better use it quick Amazon and eBay feeds/APIs are free, but CJ costs, so might be worth getting going with just two first! Shouldn't be too hard with a bit of programming knowledge. Don't know of any ready solution for this.

You could call it Amazebay, except that domain is already taken! No, it wasn't me

 

P.S. Hmm - that's a good idea. Give me about 6 months and I might get round to writing something!

Yes, the eBay API gives you XML results which you can parse into nice product description pages, however I don't believe that the user description/blurb is available through the API - could be wrong. You could write a script to scrape it off the site

The main problem I can see is matching Amazon products with eBay products in order to do a comparison. Amazon have very long product names, and eBay has totally random item names! So I am not sure how you would match them accurately - certainly not 1for1, even with some clever fuzzy comparison algo.

 

Well, I think you could do it, but it would have to be item by item (or a small number of items), done manually, and would not be the slickest thing ever. Remember I am not a programmer, but if you knew what you were doing you could spiff it up I bet.

Step 1) With BANS, I can get updating eBay feeds, also limit the number of eBay listings on a page, and put the eBay listings side by side. So you set up BANS store with your chosen number ebay widgets.

Step 2) Then I could go to Amazon and create a product link (i think this updates) or even a small aStore link (I know this does) of the same widget and place it above or below the eBay listings.

Step 3) Go to popshops and find the widgets on a CJ advertiser. Create your popshop store and put it either above or below the eBay listings.

Step 4) since you are doing this manually, your product blurb would be written by you and could be done once (top of page) for all products, etc.

That might hold you over for the six months that someone suggested it would take to create a unified system that does it automatically.

 

@markowe

It is a great idea. To be honest, I'm currently adding CJ data to a site of mine that already uses eBay's API. I gave up using Amazon as many items didn't have prices associated with them.

Neither Amazon nor eBay seem to care about product UPCs. CJ merchants include this data sometimes. Using the UPCs would make price comparisons much more efficient than by comparing titles (a fact that you mentioned).

 

Oops! I spoke to soon.

According to the documentation on the GetSearchResults call, it appears that you can search for items on eBay using UPCs. However, this can only be done for books, music, DVDs and movies, and video games.

You can do the same thing with Amazon as well using the ItemLookup operation. The docs state that searching for items by UPC is only available on the US site though (I/they could be wrong). And it seems to not be limited to any specific categories like eBay.

Finally, you can search for items by UPC in CJ via their web service. It's stated in their docs regarding the Product Catalog Search method.

So there you go. It can be done. The only limitation I can see so far is that eBay doesn't allow searching by UPC in other categories (say Clothing,Shoes, and Accessories, Cameras & Photo, etc.). If you're sticking with the aforementioned categories that eBay allows, then you could make it happen.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I think I'll see if I can do it myself.

 

Got me thinking too - I can't resist having a try now

I will publish the script for free if it seems it's worth anything. I probably wouldn't bother going the UPC route - of course it's impossible for eBay to carry UPCs with all that second-hand stuff on there, so you would be really limiting things. Probably some fuzzy search would be better. Doing it all manually would be counter-productive anyway

 

Didn't think of that. Good point! UPCs could be very limiting, especially when you consider that many items that you get from eBay or CJ don't have them.