Python Beginner Question - Would Python be the correct choice to build a bot for eBay?

[Peepingthom_]

Hello all -

I am wanting to build a bot for eBay, not for buying perse, but for adding traffic to my eBay store.

I have an ebay store, and it seems as though every time I list a new item, change the price on an existing item, or even re-list a previous sold item, the traffic increases within my store and I always end up selling items while actively putting new listings/editing old listings. This leads me to believe that there is some algorithm or something within eBay that while I am actively editing/adding items to be listed, that I end up selling at least 1 item during that time.

Long story short, I want to build a bot that can go into my eBay account, and possibly just change the price of one of my listings by .1 cent. Or have a bot go into my eBay store and automatically re-list an item that has been sold. The idea here is to have some sort of automation that goes in and edits my current/past listings in order to bring more traffic/hits to my eBay store. Does this make sense? Any help or advice is greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

 

[Antero360]

Hello all -

I am wanting to build a bot for eBay, not for buying perse, but for adding traffic to my eBay store.

I have an ebay store, and it seems as though every time I list a new item, change the price on an existing item, or even re-list a previous sold item, the traffic increases within my store and I always end up selling items while actively putting new listings/editing old listings. This leads me to believe that there is some algorithm or something within eBay that while I am actively editing/adding items to be listed, that I end up selling at least 1 item during that time.

Long story short, I want to build a bot that can go into my eBay account, and possibly just change the price of one of my listings by .1 cent. Or have a bot go into my eBay store and automatically re-list an item that has been sold. The idea here is to have some sort of automation that goes in and edits my current/past listings in order to bring more traffic/hits to my eBay store. Does this make sense? Any help or advice is greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

Hi there,
I am pretty sure that may be a violation of terms of services of eBay. You may need to double check on that before proceeding further. Don't want you to go through the work and then have your account banned.

 

[Peepingthom_]

Hi there,
I am pretty sure that may be a violation of terms of services of eBay. You may need to double check on that before proceeding further. Don't want you to go through the work and then have your account banned.

Yeah this has been a concern of mine, I know people use bots for buying items on eBay or for setting up a notification system that tells them when a "favorite" item has been re-listed or something. Let me doing some more research on how far I can push the envelope.

 

[fh1]

i dont know if Python would have the capabilities for that but maybe it could

 

[Antero360]

Yeah this has been a concern of mine, I know people use bots for buying items on eBay or for setting up a notification system that tells them when a "favorite" item has been re-listed or something. Let me doing some more research on how far I can push the envelope.

As far as your question is concerned, to be honest: any language can be used to script a bot. I myself have built bots in C#, Python, Javascript, and even Java. It all depends on whether or not there are examples you can go off of either from the Ebay API documentation, or from Github projects that others have done. I think step0: (the most important step of all lol) should be to pick at least 2 other languages along with Python, and search for examples of ebay bots. If you go on google and type "ebay bot in X", where X represents the selected language, you should get some decent results. Again, I do re-iterate my previous statement: Although yes, there are many people who use bots for their own purposes on Ebay, that doesn't mean that they are completely ok by Ebay itself. Again, I would advise you to look into Ebay's Terms of Service regarding what is allowed/disallowed with botting, before proceeding any further.

 

[Wetumen]

Absolutely makes sense! Using Python for an eBay bot to boost traffic is a solid idea. It's fascinating how your active engagement seems to trigger increased visibility. Building a bot to tweak prices or relist items is a creative approach.

 

[dstromberg]

If it's not a violation of the ToS on E-Bay, check out BeautifulSoup and/or lxml for your screenscraping in Python. Last I heard, these were the two most common modules for such things in Python.

 

[kane12]

Hi there,
I am pretty sure that may be a violation of terms of services of eBay. You may need to double check on that before proceeding further. Don't want you to go through the work and then have your account banned.

I agree with your point. It is important that firstly read the terms and conditions of ebay to gets its done.

Thanks