[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