Want to know how best to use eBay? Whether you're a newcomer or longtime user, eBay Hacks will teach you to become efficient as both a buyer and seller. You'll find a wide range of topics, from monitoring the bidding process, getting refunds, and fixing photos so that sale items look their best, to in-depth tips for running a business on eBay and writing scripts that automate some of the most tedious tasks. That's just the nuts and bolts. The book also gives you an inside look into the unique eBay community, where millions of people gather online to buy and sell. Author David Karp--an eBay user himself, with years of experience--teaches you how to work within this community to maximize your success. eBay Hacks includes four powerful sections:

• "Hacks for All" covers eBay's diplomacy and feedback system, describing how you can maintain a good feedback profile and use it to inspire trust in others.
• "Hacks for Buyers" shows you how to focus your searches to find auctions before anyone else--including ways to create an automated search robot. Then, learn how bidding works in the real world, using eBay's proxy bidding system to improve your win rate while spending less money.
• "Hacks for Sellers" teaches strategies for competitive selling, like promoting your items without spending extra money and protecting yourself from deadbeat buyers. Learn how to run a fulltime business on eBay by streamlining the listing process, communications and checkout.
• "Hacks for Developers" delves into eBay's API, an interface for writing programs that do the work that most users have to do by hand through a web browser.

With eBay Hacks, you'll be more than a buyer or seller. You will become a savvy power user who knows the smart way to save time, save money, and dramatically improve auction success.

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eBay Hacks Review,  October 23 2003
Submitted by Beth Skwarecki   [Respond | View]



I was afraid this book would be an "ebay for dummies". Fortunately, it's not. The book assumes you already know the basics of buying and selling on eBay, or can easily figure it out. This is the kind of book that, were O'Reilly not pushing a "Hacks" series, might be termed "tips and tricks". They say hacks are "'quick-and-dirty' solutions to programming problems or interesting techniques for getting a task done." (Compare the jargon file definition).

The foreword is by Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing. The chapters are broken up into "Hacks for All", "Hacks for Buyers", "Hacks for Sellers", and "Hacks for Developers".

Each chapter has maybe a dozen numbered hacks, and the numbers are displayed

prominently on the colored page corners. (I think they were just looking for

more places to use the teal color). Screenshots are in Mozilla on Windows,

and the whole book is very Windows-centric. Which makes sense, in a way:

most eBayers use Windows, and certain eBay-provided tools, like Turbo

Lister, are only available for Windows. To be fair, the author points out

alternatives for Mac and Unix whenever he discusses windows-based software

(but I think he should have given the Gimp more credit when discussing photo

manipulation tools).

Some of the hacks are ways you didn't know about to use eBay's website and

tools. Some of them are ways you can use your browser or other common

software (example: use Ctrl-F to search for the word "complaint" in a

feedback page), and these I would describe more as "tips" than "hacks".

However, there are a lot of actual sneaky clever hacks. For example: eight

different ways to contact somebody if your emails aren't getting through.

What all the query string variables are, and how to use them to make your

own links (which you can then embed in a html page on your own server).

There's even a table showing the extras you can buy when you submit an

auction listing—things like 5¢ for a Buy-It-Now button or $99 to

be featured on the front page—with recommended minimum prices for when

that feature will be worth the money. Maybe not a "hack", exactly, but a

very useful piece of information.

Karp emphasizes that eBay is a community, a place, not just a website. To

back this up, there are plenty of hacks relating to strategy and social

engineering. Like making the most out of the feedback game (when not to

leave feedback, how to get negative feedback removed), and sneaky ways to

find rare items or get the seller to end an auction early and just sell the

item to you (which must be done carefully to not run afoul of ebay

policies).

The chapter on photos didn't contain any surprises for me, but then again, I

already know how to take good pictures and use the Clone tool. I was very

impressed by the feature box explaining how and why to adjust JPG

compression. (I was less than impressed, though, by the javascript and

java-based "solutions" to image copying. The watermark is good advice, but

anything beyond that is just silly.)

The chapters on selling and running a business (and, assuming you're

profitable, the API—see below about that) seem like good advice to

those looking to really get into eBay. My only gripe there is that he didn't

talk about the security issues of taking people's credit card numbers.

Everything he did explain is correct—you want to use a secure

connection for the web form, and not email the numbers anywhere— but

simply storing credit card information in a world-writable plain text file

on your webserver is not the way to do it.

The guy knows ebay, but his coding leaves a lot to be desired.

When Rob offered this book at the meeting, he said that it contained "nasty

perl code". Rob, you didn't know how right you were. For one thing, it

parses the CGI input with something called cgi-lib.pl. What is this? I

thought. Surely it's some super-leet, special purpose extra spiffy perl

program that's better than CGI.pm and yet for some reason hasn't been made

into a module. But no. I asked some people who know perl better than I do

(read: I went to #perl on freenode) and the responses ranged from "holy

shit" to "um, you might want to upgrade to perl 5". They confirmed my

suspicions that cgi-lib.pl is "deprecated" and "suck-ass". They also added

that it was "insecure" and "pollutes your namespace". One person even

offered a quote for my review, involving unfavorable comparisons to Matt's

Script Archive. I've been blunt enough, I think, so I won't quote it here.

The HTML isn't so great either. I'm willing to forgive a lot of the bad

advice, though, because of the unique nature of ebay auction pages. Normally

you want to code for the ages, because the page you put up today might still

be there in the wonderful magical future when browsers that aren't

standards-compliant have gone extinct. But when it's a 7-day ebay auction

that will be archived for 30 days, I can deal. So I gritted my teeth while I

read about how to code with tables and font tags and iframes. The font tags

are unneccessary, but the tables I can tolerate. Iframes are actually one of

the hacks: you can use an iframe to include some text from a page on another

site, so you can change that text anytime you like, despite the restrictions

ebay has on changing the information of a running auction. I think the worst

hack, <style> tags in the <body> of the page, is in a sense the

best. <style> tags belong in the head of the page, not the body, and

it's not valid to put them in the body. But you only have access to an area

of the body of the page, not the head. And if you use <style> tags to

put a stylesheet in the body, browsers will usually render the stylesheet.

Best yet, because of the cascading nature of stylesheets (the C in CSS),

anything in your stylesheet will override anything in eBay's stylesheet,

allowing you to style the whole page. You can add a background image or

change eBay's color scheme.

At least the code is explained well. Rather than just numbering the lines,

this book's scheme uses a circled number each time something important

happens in the code. A circled (1) next to the variable declarations, say.

This makes the explanations a lot clearer to read.

As it turns out, eBay does offer an API, which only makes up one chapter of

the book (the very last chapter). This is the chapter I wanted to

read. Throughout the first seven chapters, I saw URL hacks and

screen-scrapes and kept wondering: why don't they use the API for this? The

API chapter, unfortunately, gave a good reason: eBay charges money for it.

They have four levels of licensing, the cheapest of which is the Individual

license, which allows for 50 API calls per day, with no fee. You get to

develop your programs by querying a fake sandbox server, and must be

"certified" to be able to use it on the real site. Certification costs $100

per application (more for the paid services). Bah.

If you're looking for a book about HTML or Perl, this isn't a good book for

you. But it is a good book about eBay. Karp knows all of the useful tools

eBay offers, and third-party tools too (such as esnipe.com, for easy

automated sniping). He knows the ins and outs not just of buying and selling

but also of searching and shipping. He provides detailed analyses of

whether, when, why and how to use various eBay features, such as the reserve

price or the checkout option. If you're looking for a book about HTML or

Perl, there are better ones (hint: look for a <a

href="https://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pperl3">camel on the cover) but it

would be hard to find a better book about eBay.




eBay Hacks Review,  October 22 2003
Submitted by Janet Rojas   [Respond | View]

The information contained in this book will save you time and is fairly robust though it does not cover everything.

One area that is extremely important that is just grazed over is avoiding disreputable bidders. A novice seller might think that it's good to get all bidders but the reality is that there are many bidders that will just make your life worse. Deadbeat bidders , stalkers, check bouncers etc.

The best way to avoid these types are by what essentially amounts to a credit check on your bidders. The easiest way I have found to accomplish this is by just doing a scan on them at DeadbeatBuster.Com

It is a real time database of problem bidders on all internet auction sites and can be accessed by going to https://www.firewallx.com or by simply typing DeadbeatBuster.Com into your browsers address bar.

You will instantly find out if one of your bidders has a history of not paying or other such information before your auction ends so that you can cancel their bid and sell it to the buyer with the good record.

If you do have trouble with a bidder you can report them there as well without the fear of retaliation that would go with auction feedback.




eBay Hacks Review,  October 21 2003
Submitted by David Ford   [Respond | View]

This book is essential to becoming a successful bidder or seller on eBay. Sure, you think you know how eBay works, but this book provides all those little details that help you win bids, and become a top notch seller. It covers all the facets of buying, like how to snipe, and the significance of peoples' minimum bids and Buy It Now prices. For sellers, it covers all the elements you need to put items up for auction, and much about how to add special features to your items that make them stand out. The author, David Karp is giving us the benefit of his "addiction" to eBay. Get this book and you'll be able to manage your eBay addiction before they cart you away.




eBay Hacks Review,  September 19 2003
Submitted by Dale Farris   [Respond | View]

eBay Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools

By Dale Farris, Secretary

Golden Triangle PC Club

September 2003

General Overview

Nearly everybody who now uses a computer knows that eBay has become the world's leading computer application for buying and selling goods online. A worldwide electronic garage sale, eBay now boasts buyers and sellers of nearly anything imaginable, including the Segway people mover.

eBay is more than just an auction web site. It is a vast community of millions of buyers and sellers around the world, all of whom are competing for collectibles and customers, respectively. But eBay is also a complex computer system, one that requires experience and the right tools to master.

In "eBay Hacks," author David A. Karp provides tools and strategies to master eBay, whether you are a buyer trying to win an auction without getting ripped off, or a seller dealing with anxious customers and deadbeat bidders.

eBay is a community, a platform, a social experiment, a successful business, and a microcosm of important Information Age precepts like "network effects," "positive returns to scale," "frictionless economics," even "the changing nature of intellectual property." eBay has a couple dozen knockout dissertations lurking in its depths, as well as any number of statutory reforms, sermons, and life-lessons.

According to Cory Doctorow, who wrote the foreword to the book, "eBay is becoming the most important way for people to exchange goods. Exchanging goods, exchanging information, and exchanging culture are the three most important activities undertaken by human beings, with the exception of exchanging fluids."

eBay makes us all into participants in the market. It is no coincidence that eBay's first great wave of participation came from the collectibles trade. The collectibles market occurs at the intersection of luck, knowledge, and salesmanship.

eBay has found a most cost-effective means of cataloging the world's attics and basements. It's an attic-Napster, and it has spread the cost and effort around. When you spy a nice casino ashtray on the 25-cent shelf at Thrift Town, and snap its picture and put it up on eBay, and when the renowned collector of glass ashtrays, ColBatGuano, bids it up to $400, you have taken part in a market transaction that has simultaneously cataloged a nice bit of bric-a-brac and moved it to a collection where it will be lovingly cared for. What's more, you have left a record of where it is and what it was worth when we last saw it.

eBay is big, very big. At any given time, there are over 18 million items for sale, with an average of $680 worth of transactions taking place every second. eBay started out small, and has now become a phenomenon.

Karp's book is not a hand-holding guide. He will not walk through the process of bidding on your first auction or creating your first auction listing. The book is also not about "hacking into a system," or anything so nefarious. What you will find in the book is an emphasis on trading responsibly and ethically, as well as extensive tools and tips for protecting yourself as both a buyer and a seller.

The hacks in the book address the technological and diplomatic challenges faced by all eBay members, written from the perspective of an experienced eBayer who loves challenges as much as solutions. You will find in the book the tools you need to help you trade smarter and safer, make more money, and have fun doing it.

Special Features

The book is organized into four main ideas, including hacks for all, hacks for buyers, hacks for sellers, and hacks for developers.

Learn better ways to monitor auctions, more effective ways to bid, and safer ways to pay

Use advanced search tools to find auction items before anyone else, and determine the value of an item before you bid

Protect yourself before and after you bid, and never lose another penny to dishonest sellers

Use automatic sniping tools to win more auctions and spend less money

Get more money for your items with effective descriptions and killer photos

Maintain your reputation on eBay by knowing when to leave feedback, how to set reasonable expectations, and how to deal with the other eBay members when things don't go smoothly

Utilize tools to streamline the listing process, communications, and checkout

Dive into eBay's API to develop custom software that can be integrated with your business or distributed to others

Table of Contents

The eight (8) chapters include the following titles.

Diplomacy and Feedback

Searching

Bidding

Selling

Working with Photos

Completing Transactions

Running a Business on eBay

The eBay API

Target Readers

The focus in "eBay Hacks" is on improving your buying or selling experience in eBay. Thus, the focus is primarily on helping those who are more heavily involved in eBay, especially those who are in a business that relies on eBay for some, if not all of their transactions. The book will also be of great value to those who occasionally dip into eBay's storefronts, and will be a hit with anyone looking for bargains in eBay.

Book Contents

359 pages; acknowledgments; foreword from Cory Doctorow, sci-fi writer and contributor to Wired magazine; preface; figures; tips; extensive sample code scripts; index; cover colophon

Author

David A. Karp

About the Author

David A. Karp is that dangerous combination of compulsive writer and eBay fanatic. He discovered eBay in the late 1990s while looking for a deal on an electric cat-litter box. As an avid collector of toys of all kinds, he immediately saw eBay's potential to quench his thirst for second-hand consumer electronics, handmade brass trains, and obscure parts for discontinued products of all kinds. Soon thereafter, he began selling on eBay, and now trades religiously, taking breaks occasionally to write books. He still has the litter box.

Educated in Mechanical Engineering at U.C. Berkeley, David consults on Internet technology, user-interface design, and software engineering. Author of 6 power-user books on Microsoft Windows, including the bestselling "Windows Annoyances" series, he has also written for a number of magazines, including Windows Sources Magazine, Windows Pro Magazine, and New Media Magazine, and is a contributing editor for ZTrack Magazine. Noted recognition includes PC Computing Magazine, Windows Magazine, the San Francisco Examiner, and the New York Times.

David spends some of his spare time outside with his camera, but often finds it difficult to tear himself away from a good movie. David likes hiking and skiing, almost as much as he enjoys talking about them. He scored 30.96647% on the Geek Test (www.innergeek.us/geek.html), earning a rating of "Total Geek." Animals and children trust him. He can make 15-minute brownies in less than 10 minutes, and never gets tired of the Simpsons.

ISBN

August 2003, First Edition

0-596-00564-4

List Price

$24.95

$38.95 CAN

About O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.

O'Reilly & Associates is the premier information source for leading-edge computer technologies. O'Reilly communicates the knowledge of experts through their books, conferences, and web sites. Their books, known for their animals on the covers, occupy a treasured place on the shelves of developers building the next generation of software, and their conferences and summits bring innovators together to shape the revolutionary ideas that spark new industries. From the Internet to the web, Linux, Open Source, and now Peer-to-Peer Networking, O'Reilly puts technologies on the map.

Anyone involved in information technology can always depend on O'Reilly for high quality books, as well as the most authoritative works on the market. The company's commitment to technical expertise in their books is matched by their commitment to quality production, now famously recognized by their "lay flat" binding that makes reading an O'Reilly book very convenient. Among the sea of computer titles that now fill the shelves, professionals in information technology have for many years realized the super value that is always present in any O'Reilly title.

Publisher Contact

Marsee Henon

marsee@oreilly.com

O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.

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