Executive Summary
On a daily
basis, I search eBay for auctions and bid on them accordingly so I can get a
good return when they sell. When I win an auction, I ship the instrument
directly to my repairman in Salt Lake City. He repairs them, and sends them to
my photographer, who then takes pictures, lists them, and ships them to
customers when they sell.
The problem
that I have faced since inception of my business is with Buy-it-now options on
eBay. Competitors and other users watch eBay closely and buy all of the good fixed-price
listings before I have a chance to look at them. With my current job, I have no
time to be on the computer looking for deals, so up to this point I have been
concerned with auction listings only. There is a lot of money to be made in
fixed-price listings, as an example, someone did not know that their instrument
was a collector’s horn and sold it for $2500 with the buy-it-now option. In
less than a week, it sold for $6250 by another seller.
The system I built will solve this
problem and allow me to find good deals on fixed-price listings before anyone else
can.
The system
scraps an eBay page every 3 minutes and finds if the page has changed since the
last time it was checked. If a new listing was posted, the scrapper will create
a list of the top eBay listings on the page with their respective URL, Title,
and Price.
The system
will send me an email with the top 10 listings on eBay the eBay page whenever a
new listing appears. The email will include a 2-column table with the price,
name of the listing, and a URL link connected to the name of the listing. When
I get an email from my eBay scrapper, I will be able to check the price and
title, then click on the link and see if it is a good financial investment.
The notifier
works so well with eBay, I decided to make other programs within this one. I have two other sub-procedures that scrape KSL woodwinds and brass to scrape KSL for new listings as well.
Full Description (PDF)
http://files.gove.net/shares/files/15w/sophking/Official_Final_Project_KM.pdf
Solution (Excel Workbook)
http://files.gove.net/shares/files/15w/sophking/Official_eBay_Scraper_KM.xlsm
Hey this is really cool, but I am having trouble getting it to work... think that is just because its old? was this a class at BYU?
ReplyDelete