eBay RSS: Conducting Your Own Market Research With Yahoo Pipes Jquery


 

How To Conduct Your Own eBay Market Research


To create my eBay Console Sales report I first had to come up with a way to track the sales data from eBay. I thought that it would be simple using eBay's RSS system to extract the sale price and number of bids. It turned out to be a little more complicated than I expected. However, using Yahoo! Pipes I was able to reassign some of the default RSS settings and output them as JSON (Java Script Object Notation). Using this technique I could then easily access the sales price for each item using JQuery (an addon library for JavaScript). If you are unfamiliar with programming simply watch the video above and follow the steps below. Everything is as simple as copy and paste. With this technique you can get the Avg. Sale Price and Sell through rate for any RSS feed from eBay. The video shows how to get RSS feeds from eBay's advanced search. This program only gets the last 100 items in the feed however because that is the first page of the feed and it's not programmed to go the next page in feed. I may in the future expand the program below into a tool for the web site if possible. Even if you don't know much about programming don't be afraid to try it out. I'm sorry that the code isn't well documented but I assure you that it does work.

  1. Go To http://pipes.yahoo.com/ebaybuyingfeed/rsstojson .This pipe will take any eBay RSS feed and remap the values so that you can extract the information that you want more easily. Instead of the title and description it will return the sell price and number of bids.  It will also transform the RSS into a JSON file which is much easier to work with using JavaScript. So paste your RSS value and hit "Run Pipe" after it runs click "Get As JSON". Copy the web address of the JSON feed.

  2. Open a text editor and copy and paste the code below.

  3. <HTML>
    <HEAD></HEAD>
    <BODY>
    <p></p>
    <SCRIPT>$(document).ready(function(){
    var URL = [];
    URL = [];//Insert your JSON addresses here in quotes seperated by commas
    var jsonFormat = "&_callback=?";
    $.each(URL, function(aindex, urlval){

    var outString = "";
    var AVG;
    var saleRate;

    var Total = 0;
    var soldItems = 0;
    var allItems = 0;
    var ajaxURL = urlval + jsonFormat;

    $.getJSON(ajaxURL,function(data){

    $.each(data.value.items, function(index, val) {
    if (val.title != null){

    soldItems++;
    Total += parseFloat(val.description);
    }

    allItems++;
    });

    AVG = (Total/soldItems)* 0.01;
    saleRate = soldItems/allItems;
    $("p").append(document.createTextNode(AVG + "," + saleRate + ","));

    });

    });

    });

    </SCRIPT>
    </BODY>

    </HTML>

  4. Save the file as a .html file.

  5. Insert your JSON addresses as shown in the code above and save.

  6. Open the file using Mozilla Firefox.

  7. You should have a list of average sale prices and and sell through rates for the various feeds.

  8. Organize these using CSV files and spreadsheet software.


This method is best used over time as each feed only returns the last 100 items from eBay. You can take samples over the course of some weeks and compile the results with spreadsheet software. For more in depth market research I suggest using a paid service like terapeak.

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1 Comments

  1. [...] While researching some items to sell on eBay today I noticed something strange. As I normally do headed over to eBay’s advanced search entered my search term and scrolled down to the bottom to find the orange RSS button. However, it seems  that eBay has removed it during their search redesign. So I wanted to check and make sure that my featured eBay Feeds were still working and they were. What this means is that the RSS system is still in place eBay just no longer seems to be adding a convenient way to access it. This is important because RSS can be used to do a lot of Advanced eBay Market Research for free. [...]

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