[donohoe]

This looks great and nicely built. Once you've created something like this how do you start getting traffic? My assumption is you also need to market it somehow but the specifics of how to do that always eluded me.

Any suggestions or strategies you could share?

[gotrecruit]

not making any claims whatsoever, but do keep in mind a very typical strategy of sites and businesses like that is to go on forums like this and brag about their apparent success when it's not true, because perceived success sometimes begets true success. i know because i've done it myself successfully - for my last 2 startups i went to reddit and told long form stories which are ultimately nothing more than hyperbolic origins of my startup intended to drum up interest, and both instances brought a sizeable wave of initial traffic.

[edgartaor]

So... "fake it till you make it"

[wriggler]

In my case it was word of mouth, social sharing, and the good graces of Google. Each individual user is simply worth too little to make a paid marketing strategy viable.

With the traffic I had, I did a lot of A/B testing to maximise conversions.

[Exuma]

How do you handle scraping the products, do you just fetch all new products once per day? Or do you fetch them all in real time as the user searches

[wriggler]

Everything is done with real time calls to the eBay API. eBay's catalogue is too large to make it realistic to fetch it as a whole and, anyway, as far as I remember they don't offer a data dump (it's been a long time since I checked).

Luckily, eBay's API is very fast, but I also worked hard to keep the total response time of my code within a reasonable range.

[Exuma]

Ah interesting, that makes sense. Thanks