eBay Hacks

Spellcheck All Your Auctions

Ensure that your titles and descriptions are spelled correctly.

The success of any auction is largely due to how readily it can be found in eBay searches. As described in Chapter 2, eBay searches show only exact matches (with very few exceptions), which means, among other things, that spelling most definitely counts.

Neither eBay’s Sell Your Item form nor Turbo Lister supports spellchecking of any kind. So it’s left to sellers to scrutinize their titles and auction descriptions, and to obnoxious bidders to point out any mistakes. Once again, the API comes to the rescue.

The Script

The following script requires the following modules and programs:

Module/program name	Available at
HTML::FormatText (by Sean M. Burke)	http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?HTML::FormatText
HTML::TreeBuilder (by Sean M. Burke)	http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?HTML::TreeBuilder
HTML::Entities (by Gisle Aas)	http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?HTML::Entities
Lingua::Ispell (by John Porter)	http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Lingua::Ispell
ispell program (by Geoff Kuenning)	http://fmg-www.cs.ucla.edu/geoff/ispell.html

#!/usr/bin/perl require 'ebay.pl'; require HTML::TreeBuilder; require HTML::FormatText; use Lingua::Ispell qw( spellcheck ); Lingua::Ispell::allow_compounds(1); $out1 = ""; $outall = ""; $numchecked = 0; $numfound = 0; $today = &formatdate(time); $yesterday = &formatdate(time - 86400); my $page_number = 1; PAGE: while (1) { my $rsp = call_api({ Verb => 'GetSellerList', ...