Apple iPhone Craze + AuctionAds = Cha-Ching !!!

So the Apple iPhone just launched today, and geeks all over the country are in a mad rush to get their hands on one. Unfortunately for them (and fortunately for you) limited quantities mean many of the will have to turn to eBay for a chance to purchase an iPhone.

Have you seen the crazy prices the iPhones are selling for on eBay? At the time of this writing, the top closed price for an 8GB iPhone is $2500.

The eBay Affiliate Sales Report Tool Now Uses eBay API

After my last post about my "eBay Affiliate Sales Report Tool" I immediately took some time to get acquainted with the eBay API. As of yesterday afternoon, The eBay Affiliate Sales Report Tool is 100% API based.

As expected, it only took a few minutes to recover my username and password. After that I spent 2-3 hours reading documentation, applying for tokens, and trying out the sample code. I had to call it a night(morning) when the eBay API went down. It was displaying Http/1.1 Service Unavailable for my requests. Looking back it was probably a good thing since I may have been up all night coding.

I initially thought I had been blocked or something because I went to check shoemoney's auctionads system and saw it was still serving ads. But then I remembered that they also had a killer caching system in place, so it was very likely that it would take a while before their own systems went down.

This is one major problem with living off a 3rd parties API. You also have to suffer through their system downtime, unless you have a system in place to keep going for a while. Certain types of API based applications can withstand API downtime better than others.

My app is based on returning data that I don't know I have to return until it's requested. So it makes it almost impossible to prepare for API downtime. One work around would involve switching to the good old system the app was developed with whenever the API is non responsive.

Another new problem I now have to deal with is the 5000 eBay API calls a day limit for the eBay API. However after certification the limits will go up to either 1.5 million calls a day for the application, or a user-based limit of 20,000 calls per user. My other option is to have users install the app on their servers and have them use their own API quota. I'll be evaluating both options over the next few days.

New Tool For eBay Affiliate Program

I've been active in the eBay affiliate program for a little over a year and a half (If I remember correctly) and it took me a while to realize that the auction ids for the sales you generated were hidden in the csv reports from cj.

Anyway after this little discovery, I've been manually hand picking different line items to id. Basically the process is as follows.

1. I log in to cj an check sales for the day.
2. I notice a big commission from eBay and export the report as csv
3-4. I search for the sale, identify the auction id and plug it into eBay search to find out what I just sold.

Steps 3-4 are repeated for every interesting line the the csv file.

I don't know why this info wasn't just included in the csv file. I also don't know why it took me over a year to site down and write a script to automate this task.

So anyway last weekend I did something about it, and so I now present:

"The eBay Affiliate Sales Report Tool" or eASRT for short. Don't you just love the original name?

It's still in beta because it's not yet perfect. First of all I'm not using the eBay API yet. I have a developer account from years ago, and because I've not done anything with it I have no idea how to sign in or anything. I'm sure I could recover in info with 5-10 mins of digging around, but I wanted a good excuse to sharpen my regular expressions skills.

Now that I have a semi workable script, I need a good excuse to get acquainted with the eBay API. The next revision of the script will use the API. This should definitely improve the speed of this tool quite a bit. I've had someone tell me they had to wait 3mins for a large report to run. Yikes!

Anyway check out "The eBay Affiliate Sales Report Tool", I'd like to hear your comments, and suggestions.