Hacks 1917 Industrial.. Strength Tips and Tools [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 92 Automatically Relist Unsuccessful Auctions

Save time by automatically relisting auctions
that have received no bids or have a reserve that
wasn't met.

Most of the time, when an auction
ends without receiving any bids or with a reserve that
wasn't met, sellers end up relisting the item. But
this can be rather laborious, especially if you have more than a few
auctions to relist.

The following script will relist for you, and when run on a regular
basis, say, every day, you'll never have to manually
relist an auction again.

#!/usr/bin/perl
require 'ebay.pl';
$localfile = "autorelist.txt";     [1]
$today = &formatdate(time);
$yesterday = &formatdate(time - 86400);
my $page_number = 1;
PAGE:
while (1) {
my $rsp = call_api({ Verb => 'GetSellerList',
DetailLevel => 8,
UserId => $user_id,
EndTimeFrom => $yesterday,
EndTimeTo => $today,
PageNumber => $page_number
});
if ($rsp->{Errors}) {
print_error($rsp);
last PAGE;
}
foreach (@{$rsp->{SellerList}{Item}}) {
my %i = %$_;
($id, $bidder) = @i{qw/Id HighBidder/};
if ($bidder->{User}{Email} !~ "\@") {     [2]
open (INFILE,"$localdir/$localfile");
while ( $line = <INFILE> ) {
if ($line eq "$id\n") { goto SKIP; }     [3]
}
close (INFILE);
my $rsp = call_api({Verb => 'RelistItem',     [4]
DetailLevel => 0,
SiteId => $site_id,
ItemId => $id
});
if ($rsp->{Errors}) {
print_error($rsp)
} else {
print "Relisted item $id as #$rsp->{Item}[0]{Id}\n";
open (OUTFILE,">>$localdir/$localfile");
print OUTFILE "$id\n";     [5]
close (OUTFILE);
}
}
}
SKIP:
last PAGE unless $rsp->{SellerList}{HasMoreItems};
$page_number++;
}

This script starts by listing all your auctions that have ended in
the last 24 hours, similarly to [Hack #87]. For information on scheduling
this script to run at regular intervals, see [Hack #17]. If you decide to have the script
run less frequently, say, once a week, make sure to increase the
window of dates accordingly for which auctions are retrieved.

The script determines that an auction ended unsuccessfully if the
high bidder's email address is not specified, or,
more specifically, that the email address field does not contain an
@ sign (line [2]). For
auctions that have received no bids, the
HighBidder.User.Email field will be empty, or, if
the reserve wasn't met, it will be set to
"Invalid Request."

Then, the script checks to see if the auction has been previously
relisted [3]; if it hasn't,
the script proceeds to relist the auction [4]. If the relist operation is successful, a
confirmation is shown and the auction number is recorded [5] into the filename specified on line [1]. (Note that there's no need
to use the VerifyAddItem API call to confirm a
successful relist, since the script already checks for errors.)

8.12.1 Hacking the Hack

If you don't want to automatically relist each and
every unsuccessful auction, you can set restrictions. For example,
you may not wish to relist any item under five dollars or any item
that has already been relisted three times.

One thing you can do to improve the success of your relisted auctions
is to lower the starting bid and/or reserve price. Now, if you
don't explicitly specify the value of a particular
option for the relisted auction, the script will simply use the value
from the original auction. But, for example, if you specify a new
starting bid or reserve price (perhaps 15% lower than the previous
values) on line [4], those values will be
used for the new auction. Most of the input arguments available for
the AddItem API call (discussed in [Hack #88]) can be used in
RelistItem as well; see the API documentation for
details.