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eBay Hacks
book

eBay Hacks

by David A. Karp
August 2003
Beginner content levelBeginner
368 pages
9h 38m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from eBay Hacks

Submit an Auction Listing

Use AddItem to start new listings and make scheduling easier.

eBay’s Turbo Lister, introduced in [Hack #73], is an API-based tool used to submit new listings to eBay. It provides a complete interface with which the user can create and modify listings, as well as a database engine that stores them. (Factoid: 35% of eBay listings are reportedly submitted with the API, including those uploaded with Turbo Lister.)

All the work is done by the AddItem API call, illustrated by this extremely simple script:

#!/usr/bin/perl
require 'ebay.pl';

$category    = shift @ARGV;
$title        = shift @ARGV;
$description = shift @ARGV;
$minimum_bid = shift @ARGV;
defined($minimum_bid)
              or die "Usage: $0 category title description minimumbid";

$country = 'us';
$location = 'My home town';
$duration = 7;
$quantity = 1;
$currency = 1;

my $rsp = call_api({ Verb => 'AddItem',     [1]
              DetailLevel => 0,
                   SiteId => $site_id,
                 Category => $category,
 CheckoutDetailsSpecified => 0,
                  Country => $country,
                 Currency => $currency,
              Description => $description,
                 Duration => $duration,
                 Location => $location,
               MinimumBid => $minimum_bid,
             PaymentOther => 1,
                 Quantity => $quantity,
                   Region => 0,
                    Title => $title,
});
if ($rsp->{Errors}) {
    print_error($rsp)
} else {
    print "New listing created: #$rsp->{Item}[0]{Id}\n";     [2]
    print "Ends $rsp->{Item}[0]{EndTime}\n";
}

The simplest way to use this script is to call it from the command line, like this:

additem.pl 7276 'Little Red Steam Shovel' 'My description...' 5.00

However, ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596005644Catalog PageErrata