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by cjsuk 3139 days ago
It's not really for public consumption because it's embarrassingly badly written :)

It's pretty dumb really. Just figured out the search URLs and then parse the list responses. It then stores the auctions/ad IDs it has seen in a tiny redis instance with 60 days' expiry on each ID it inserts. If there are any items it hasn't seen each time it runs, it compiles them in a list and emails them to me via AWS SNS. Runs every 5 minutes from cron on a Raspberry Pi Zero plugged into the back of my XBox 360 as a power supply and my router via a USB/ethernet cable.

The main bulk of the work went into the searches to run which are a huge list of typos on things with a high return. I tend to buy, test, then reship them for profit. Not much investment gives a very good return - pays for the food bill every month :)

1 comments

Thanks for the info - I'm sure mine will be of lower quality when I do write it - hoping to compile real-world info on sold vehicles by scraping info from eBay and Gumtree, but that will take time and more skills than I currently possess. Good to hear someone's made something out of a similar idea, though.
Sounds like a good idea. Good luck - you can do it! :)