Using PHP to pull market prices off of EBay

I'm building a website database for a buy/sell/trade store. They want to get real time online prices for cellphones based on ebay. I want to automate this process by showing the phone and the price. Any ideas? I'm pretty green when it comes to PHP but i hear it will change my life.

 

use CURl to get the live price from ebay

 

Thanks a lot for this one, and i hope this is gonna help me in my eBay problem..

 

you need a script for your CURL functions, just make one so that you can easily call, parse, select DOM everytime.

 

cURL or file_get_contents and organize the data.

 

Agree with all of you. Use CURL, it's prefect but you are going to automate this process for long time then the continuous curl request may block your IP by eBay so try to use some proxy with curl call and give the proper user agent. Enjoy

 

You dont need to bother with a proxy, ebay provide a public API where you can pull the data from.

Using curl is fine, if your server allows it. See here for full info;
http://developer.ebay.com/

 

thanks alot everyone. this is great information.

 

your welcome - if you get stuck then feel free to pm - ive used ebays api quite a lot over many jobs.

 

Why don't you just use the ebay api? Very very easy to get the prices for any items if you know the term, category, product code etc. Integrates with php in about 10 lines of code, very simple.