Requirement checks & average price extension

[TheNewGuy]

Hey,

I have two ideas. Idea 1: Auction requirement verification, Idea 2: Average ebay market price of an item available to users

Recently I had items I scheduled snipes on for items indicated as shipping to US, without exclusion, or inclusion of Canada. I emailed the respective sellers, and they agreed to ship to Canada.

I scheduled the snipes. The auction ends, and for one seller, the bids are placed, for another seller, the bids are not placed due to the error that I do not meet the requirement of being in the USA.

Although this should be a minority of us experiencing the problem, is there any way a test button, or an automatic server check be made so that bidders like me are informed of certain requirements we do not meet by default, and may need to contact the seller specifically about? I understand this may be difficult without Gixen actually placing a bid to see if it works or not, just throwing out an idea.



Next idea follows a website for magic the gathering cards prices. It monitors online prices, mainly ebay I believe, and logs the price of every item (from a database of card names). Users can then search up a specific card name, and find the average price and the price range (low, high) and the std deviation of prices for a more accurate representation of market prices.

website: http://www.magictraders.com/

a sample search of a card:

http://www.magictraders.com/cgi-bin/query.cgi?list=magic&target=scalding+tarn&field=0&operator=re

This is done automatically, with a finite number of items in the database for the website to search and log.

Could a similar option be made to be either integrated into, or as an entire extension / alternate program to gixen? This would be where users enter search terms, like they do in ebay, and they may need to select certain results so the program learns what exactly the user is looking for. Then it logs the items and the prices over time, and provides an easy market price for items that individual is interested in. This way the program won't have to log all ebay items, only the ones relevant to each specific user.

However I must admit that I have not done any research on existing products providing this function, which there probably is.

[Cupid]

It usually isn't possible to check that requirements are met without placing a bid, eBay does not display anywhere (visible to the buyer) what the requirements are.

There are, I believe, other websites that provide price monitoring/display options, presumably the one you quote is one such site, they usually require a reasonably large subscription, I think. I guess that reflects the amount of work required to implement the services they provide.
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Mark

[mario]

Mark, I am not sure that the price is always related to the effort. In fact this does not look all that difficult to implement (for individual interests). With the amount of time I have, I will not be the one doing it, however.

As for services that provide full ebay history and analytics (such as terapeak, etc), they require a significant infrastructure for this, which is not cheap. The database of all entries in a year or two is huge - and subsequent database searches are very expensive resource-wise. Such a service requires significant processing power, storage, database licenses, etc. To give you an idea - every second there is around 200 or so new listings on average, or 6 billion a year (my estimate, I may be wrong). Just harvesting all that info in real time is challenging, nevertheless maintaining the storage and serving various database requests over all that data.

[TheNewGuy]

Would it help if:

1. The Gixen extension merely takes the information collected in the databases of other ebay analytic sites (which may require subscription by Gixen to their services / servers)? This would limit the financial sunk costs and make it into a variable cost.

2. Or only being interested with the individual items that Gixen users are interested in, and purging the database / results every so often (3-6 months?) to reduce the need for excess servers?

3. Or simply searching the already present ebay completed listing for data

[Gixen]

[mario]

Well, I wouldn't mix this with Gixen, it's a completely different service.

All options 1-3 are more complicated, more expensive, or not viable at all, than simply subscribing to the specialized service that serves that purpose.

[TheNewGuy]

Kk, just a suggestion

Cheers