eBay Hacks, 2nd Edition

Automatically Keep Track of Auctions You’ve Won

Maintain a permanent record of everything you’ve ever purchased.

Since eBay keeps auctions on site only for a few months and lists them in My eBay for only 60 days, all bidders should maintain permanent, off-site records of the items they’ve purchased.

As long as you keep a permanent archive of all email you’ve received (see the Preface), you’ll always have records of the item numbers, titles, seller IDs and email addresses, and closing prices of the items you’ve won. But this data is stored in a less-than-convenient format, and the descriptions aren’t stored at all.

Here’s a script that will automatically retrieve and store details for every auction you’ve won:

	#!/usr/bin/perl
	require 'ebay.pl';
	
	$today = &formatdate(time);
	$yesterday = &formatdate(time - 86400);

	my $rsp = call_api({ Verb => 'GetBidderList',
					DetailLevel => 32,
					   UserId => $user_id,
					   SiteId => $site_id,
				  EndTimeFrom => $yesterday,
				    EndTimeTo => $today,
   });
   if ($rsp->{Errors}) { 
     print_error($rsp); 
   } else { 
     foreach (@{$rsp->{BidderList}{Item}}) { 
	   my %i = %$_;  
 ($highbidder, $title, ...