I wanted to buy a Blackberry for work, my company don’t provide me with one, preferring smoke signals instead ;-). Obviously I didn’t want to pay top dollar for it so it was off to eBay in search of a bargain. I noticed there was a large spread of prices for the same phone, which lead me to wonder if I could research the sold prices for various items.
It turns out that you can’t via eBay, but some other company does provide an API (with a free option) which can be used to search the sold prices. Long story short here is a file that you can use to get the prices. You’ll need to get a developers key first though, at:
https://developer.ebay.com/join/Default.aspx
Mine took a day to come through….
“User Guide…”
Get your AppID key and paste it in the “eBay developers App ID” box, then type something in the keyword box, then pick a currency then and parent category, then a child one. Click search!. If you can’t find anything in this category, try a slightly different set of keywords, of check the “search all” box, to search the all the listings.
The “update category data” link under the child category drop down updates the data in the category dropdowns as eBay change them form time to time.
Note on quality….
Over all I’m a bit disappointed by the whole thing. As I’ve thought about it, while writing the app, it’s dawned on me that it’s quite a tricky thing to do. You see the problem is, eBay gets hammered by people selling links to things, or multiply items, or broken things, or replicas, or mis-listings (something listed as “Oakley sunglass, but when you read the detail it says there not actually Oakley’s but they look like them etc), so getting a true average price is actually quite hard… I’m not sure I trust the results. As the API does not return a list of all the items that go into the average price you can’t eye ball the data. But it’s better than nothing I guess.
Download the workbook here:
