Show HN: I made a site that calculates the market price of items on ebay.

getmarketprice.com

15 points·locksley··11 comments

I made this in rails over a couple of weekends after learning how to code late last year. The inspiration came from wanting to buy an iPhone 5 from ebay but not knowing what a fair price should be. After a writing a script to calculate this for myself, I thought it could be useful for others too and abstracted it into its current incarnation.

Any feedback would be fantastic, especially on UX!

I keep getting an error:

Application Error

An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.

same here

Sorry! It should be ok now.

Now it's throwing a 500 error that says: "Sorry, we stuffed up. Please try again."

http://i.imgur.com/zhNDB.png

/results?utf8=✓

This made me laugh aloud.

Can you dive more into the technical details of this, eg. are you using the ebay API or are you scraping the data?

Yeah sure, it's a scraper. The histogram is then built out of the 200 results retrieved from 'completed listings', minus the ones that weren't sold. The X/Y scatter plot is built from the 200 upcoming results, intended as a way to find good bargains after you know the median/mean price.

And the scraper is using a "logged in" ebay account, correct? Because I believe to view completed listings you need to be logged in.

Perhaps implement a cache for the results? It already seems to be being hit quite hard!

Sadly just reporting an error when I tried.

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