eBay Hacks, 2nd Edition

Negative Feedback Bidder Alert

Have a script automatically notify you if an eBay member with negative feedback has bid on one of your auctions.

One of the best ways to keep away deadbeat bidders [Hack #68] is to monitor your auctions and look for potential troublemakers, namely those with negative feedback ratings.

This script scans through your currently running auctions and notifies you via email whenever a high bidder has a feedback rating of less than zero:

#!/usr/bin/perl
require 'ebay.pl';
  $today = &formatdate(time);
$tendays = &formatdate(time + 864000);
my $page_number = 1;
PAGE:
while (1) {
    my $rsp = call_api({ Verb => 'GetSellerList',
DetailLevel => 8,
 UserId     =>    $user_id,
EndTimeFrom => $today,
 EndTimeTo  =  > $tendays,
PageNumber  => $page_number
});
if ($rsp->{Errors}) {
print_error($rsp);
last PAGE;

}
foreach (@{$rsp->{SellerList}{Item}}) { 
  my %i          = %$_;
($id,  $bidder)  = @i{qw/Id HighBidder/};

if ($bidder->{User}{Feedback}{Score} < 0) {
 open(MAIL,"|/usr/sbin/sendmail -t"); print MAIL "To: $selleremail\n"; print MAIL 
"From: $selleremail\n"; print MAIL "Subject: Negative Feedback Bidder Alert\n\n"; 
 print MAIL "A bidder with negative feedback has placed a bid on one of your auctions:\n";
 print MAIL "$itemurl$id\n"; 
close(MAIL);

 }
}
last PAGE unless $rsp->{SellerList}{HasMoreItems};

$page_number++;
}

This script is similar to the one in “Automatically Keep Track of Items You’ve Sold” [Hack #112] , with the notable exception that listings are retrieved for auctions ending any ...