Show HN: Bidtrest - Pinterest style searching for eBay | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Bidtrest - Pinterest style searching for eBay

bidtrest.com

14 pointsiamben12 comments

Weekend project 'just to see if I could'. Was pretty quick to build the bulk of it, tidying it up (and keeping it simple) has been a good few evenings in front of the TV over the last couple of weeks.

The domain is an obvious nod to pinterest and bidding / eBay, albeit with a typo (a missing 'e') - probably how I got it in the first place. By the time I realised (and saw the spelling with the 'e' version of the domain had gone), I was so used to calling it Bidtrest I figured I'd just roll with it... :-)

Thoughts and comments most appreciated, happy to answer any questions!

First off it looks great and works well, well done!

My only suggestion would be to do some (more?) filtering on the results and specifically what images your showing to the end users, as you will see from the below screenshot there can be many duplicates shown depending on the search term, which reduce the user experience.

http://pingbin.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Screen-Shot-20...

Thanks for the suggestions earlier - have now put something in place :-)

If a multiple of items are listed together if they have the same title, price, picture and listing type (ie same number of bids, BIN, etc), it's removed from the returned items. This should cut out the same stuff, but still show you what people are bidding on (or those with fewer bids).

Looks a lot better on your 'triumph cub' search!

Thanks again!

Thanks for the look / comments!

Yeah, it's a tough call, isn't it? Obviously the pictures back from eBay are all different URLs, because they all belong to different auction listings. I suppose one way to do it would be to filter results with the same title, price and seller - try to catch those that upload multiple listings of the same thing?

Maybe I'll look into that :-)

Thanks again!

Using the example that I showed there all of the images were pointing towards the same URL, assuming your application is image URL aware it should be fairly easy to only display the uniques :)

What do you know?! I should have checked that. I'm guessing (and it's pretty obvious thinking about it) eBay just reuse the link to the same images.

Yeah, should be any trouble at all to sort duplicates - I'll probably aim to try and drop out listings with the same title, price and image. If the price if different you'll obviously want to click on the cheaper one, title could be size etc.

Thank you, your help/ideas are really appreciated!

edit: by duplicates I mean auctions similar enough to be duplicate. Obviously each one is a unique auction.

Looks good! Maybe put a placeholder text on the first page and I think there could also be another short one-liner describing the site's purpose.

And maybe it's just me but in order to compare prices, remaining time on an auction and such, I prefer a table or list layout instead of the Pinterest masonry style.

That said, I think I need some kind of short and sweet weekend project too, really longing for the feeling of having something out there, up and running. You already did it, thumbs up!

Great comment, thanks! I love just hacking bits together - it's so much fun! So many of my projects don't get finished it's nice to actual finish something.

A placeholder is a great idea. I'll that add this weekend. My dad said exactly the same thing with regards to the lay out. He likes to scan along the lines. Saying that, it doesn't fit very well with the big picture format :-)

Looks like a less-polished version of Rummage (http://rumma.ge)

Yeah, I saw Rummage a couple of nights ago. It's great - I'm glad I saw it after I'd finished making this otherwise it may have been another project filed under 'uncompleted'. I'm also super happy I saw I didn't see this before I started otherwise I may never have bothered.

FWIW, I deliberately tried to make it as simple as possible. It was also just an excuse to see if I could do it - and have a chance to play with Masonry, create an eBay compatible app, do something other than my normal work etc.. I'm happy with it! (although I'll definitely take some of the below/above comments into consideration this weekend)

Thanks for your comment, though!

What is the application written in?

PHP [ducks] ;-)

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