Sometimes I spot things in my day to day work which I simply have to link to from here. This is the latest one, the new my eBay that the team are working on. An awesome blog post looking for feedback and opening up to the community. The New My eBay – eBay Chatter Blog
I am particularly impressed with the “My Reminders” section idea.
I am speaking at the eBay Developer’s Conference 2007 (after I had an awesome time last year speaking about “Taking your application International”). This year my main talk is entitled “Data Mining: The Key to Affiliate Success”… awesome title huh? 😉 Here’s the blurb
Speaker Alex Schultz put himself through college as an affiliate and run the eBay UK affiliate program. That’s why you should come listen to him speak about the key to affiliate success: data mining. Hear real life examples of how data mining gives affiliates an advantage, how to optimize where you send your clicks, how to be truly certain you have a significant result from your optimization efforts, and more. Learn my secrets and make lots of money for very little work.
I am hoping that a fair few people turn up to this talk because I am going to be letting people into tips of the trade with regard to the data eBay passes in affiliate reporting but also more importantly into how you can back engineer your way into useful eBay data and stats to give you an optimization head start with our APIs. Stay tuned and check out my eBay Dev Con del.icio.us links related to my talk. I will also be walking the floor at eBay live and in the “International booth” located between Canada and PayPal so please do head over!
One of the things I have found very hard as an eBay API developer (with two certified applications) is the eBay search results page URL structure. My latest project requires me to build more complex eBay search URL structures on the fly. Below I explain how to create eBay URLs on the fly based on my understanding.
The search will return BIN only items, items available to certain countries, search title and desc, select a category, include a price range and show the eBay “welcome new user banner”. There are of course more variables possible but this is a good start.
The link above is a search for a “4gb ipod nano product red” the query section of the search should be simple enough to spot. You replace the spaces with “-” and append the search string to the search.ebay.com.
If you wish to then start exploring more complex variables you append _W0 to tell eBay search they are coming and then each variable is preceeded by QQ. The order of the variables appears not to matter.
So there you have an outline of some of the main variables in the eBay advanced search URLs, this definitely prooved really useful for me to create my little application, I hope it’s useful for you.
Ok I am simply blown away by the latest offering from the eBay API as an awesome way to make a bunch of money. eBay is now revealing (without the data + formula behind it of course) the results of their related searches algorithm. When you search on eBay for “tmx” on eBay at the moment it will give you 937 items but just above that it will give you the following related searches: ps3, wii, tmx elmo, tickle me elmo, playstation 3
This is really useful information you can use to determine (as a paid search advertiser for example) hey I don’t want to buy keyword “tmx” it’s too pricey but keyword “tickle me elmo” is closely related… I will buy that instead and send the clicks to the same page as TMX. This data is quite simply awesome and exposed world wide for free. Make use of it and you’ll do great, esp. as an ebay affiliate and you can access it via the REST API, I am playing with this and a little bit of MAA right now 🙂
I have spent a lot of the last week hacking about with the Skype api and vbs. I have wscript on my computer and wanted to open a skype chat window and send a message to the user based on the content of an API call response. Here is the code I used with the Skype4Com dll to do the skype call adapted from some JS API call code already available online. As always this is a true hack and so may not be 100% stable or great code it is offered as is for you to play with.
So today I was hacking around with the Skype API to put together a little bot which will contact me once an hour while I am at work with some interesting data from the web. The idea is it will eventually be a bot that uses the eBay API to tell me when a certain item I am looking for is listed as a BIN under a certain price. I’ve been looking at various ways to do this but (since I only have one computer here and don’t fancy going to the hassle of partitioning the hard drive) in the end I chose to use window’s scheduled tasks and VBS (although perl with active perl gave it a run for it’s money).
Due to this I am interested when random facts about VBS and indeed visual basic turn up but this one truly made me fall over backwards. WHO by default would set up a programming language to use banker’s rounding WHY would I want 4.985 to round to 4.98 rather than 4.99 when I go to 3 significant figures!
Ah well thanks to the comments section of daily wtf for clearing that one up 🙂
I have been working on a syndicatable eBay tag cloud for quite some time now and finally completed it yesterday. It seems to be working really well. I just wanted to make this post to #1 announce the tag cloud but also #2 give people somewhere to post suggestions for how to improve it so go on… post a comment.
In my last post I explained that I was investigating the interrelation of keywords (or tags) in eBay titles to see if they could help me to producing some kind of dynamic categorization for the eBay site. I completed my research yesterday and wanted to share it here, the answer definitely seems to be yes and that really excites me.
The experiment involved me pulling all the titles for the 77750 listings related to the word iPod on eBay.com and saving all those titles into a database. I then split each title into individual words and entered them into a mySQL database then running an SQL query to give me the DISTINCT keywords and the COUNT of how many times they occurred in the titles.
What I found was absolutely fantastic. The keyword ipod had a 31% probability of association with the word Nano, 28% with case and Apple, 27% with video and so on.
Dynamic categorization and keyword discovery carefully optimized by millions of sellers over 10s of thousands of items daily with billions of dollars of GMV in any category of item you could want exposed for free! That’s gotta be worth something to someone 🙂
Last night was a really interesting play around for me with C Sharp (C#). I decided a while back that it is a huge opportunity to be able to place widgets on users’ desktops in Windows but quite simply I did not know how. Off the back of that idea I bought Visual Studio .NET and decided to teach myself how to program in C#. The book I used to teach myself is called Microsoft Visual C#.NET Step by Step and is written by John Sharp and Jon Jagger. The two Jonnies have done a fantastic job in this book of helping you step by step work your way into C# and I am very grateful.
There are a few simple steps for getting a browser integrated into a windows application using Visual Studio and Windows C# .NET. Initially you need to set yourself up a new project of the type “Windows Application”. Once you have created this new application you need to be able to insert the webbrowser into the C# form under the design option in the Visual Studio .net interface. The way you add the webbrowser is through Tools > Add/Remove Toolbox items > menu where you select the Microsoft Web Browser COM component.
Now within the toolbox you will see the Microsoft Web Browser icon, you can drag and drop this to the windows form and you will have integrated the web browser into your form. Now you have your web browser in your form you are pretty much done but of course you will see nothing in this form unless you set a base referring URL within the code.
Good luck and I will be sure to post anything fun I do with this technology.
Late last night I finished programming something I have been playing with for a the last week. It is a tag cloud using the “GetPopularResults” API call from the eBay API and forcing a curve for the word font sizes.
The upshot of this little bit of programming is the image shown to the left of this post and you can see the live version at example eBay TagCloud. I will post in the near future a way that you can create your own version of this Tag Cloud and the code used to call the eBay API.
The Tag Cloud displayed is for category “1” (Collectibles) on siteid 3 (the eBay.co.uk site) and shows the top 30 words searched for in this category and site combination using the GetPopularKeywords call on the eBay API.
Of course due to the simplicity of calling internationally on the eBay API this cloud can easily be set up for any country and for any category which I am really proud about.
