Power Sellers Unite

fastautosports · Joined: 23 Apr 2006 Posts: 344 Location: Jacksonville, FL

j&gsales wrote (View Post): › docWrite("quote")the pax bulk for probid can be fixed, just check out plunderhere as i've fixed that one. as long as your csv is correct, your listings will be also. I can also add custom fields if you have a mod that requires them.

You are the one that fixed Speedwaybids aren't you when I tried uploading the Water Methanol Injection items?

I am probably going to list some more stuff over there and see what happens.

-Tom

modlowarvai · Joined: 25 Nov 2008 Posts: 36

check out my site, it is a php engine, has a bulk lister which is in the process of being complete redone for better performace plus we have a csv file upload in the myfolders section. Also the phpprobid lister works on it at the moment but doesn't support buyitnow as some have used it

usoldnet · Joined: 05 Feb 2008 Posts: 502

I have a bidware site -- chat service up for sale
http://sailirc.net its listed cheap for a domain name thats been
around for 4-5 years. We have it as make offer on our auction site.

have a .com .net .us set selling separate or as a set.

I do not have time to run both.

tallship

Well I haven't seen any discussion surrounding AJ Auction Pro OOPD here yet. I'm looking heavily at phpprobid, like the idea of mods, and even checked over at http://cve.mitre.org without finding any entries for probid.

That's a major resource and required stop for anyone looking at adopting a new platform. I've been a member of the MD-Pro Development Team for many years, a Nuke that's pretty much run it's course and remains for posterity and historical reference nowadays.

I like Joomla, and the very extensive GPL'd extensions library. I kind of get the impression from @Binarywebs' site that probid is of the same *NUKE/Joomla/CMS type of ware in concept, although it's obviously commercial and not a GPL offering. Which is okay by me as long as development is active and security is proactive.

I don't see them going bye bye anytime soon.

But what about ajsquare.com's AJ Auction product? has anyone fired that up and loaded it or thoroughly elbow checked it for bugs?

purple_reading_giraffe · Joined: 04 Feb 2008 Posts: 5485 Location: Indiana, USA

Well, Brad - I looked in my spreadsheet (available at link below) in my Site Software column and found ONE entry for AJ Square. My data is not comprehensive, but I did note what several sites were using when I could identify it. Probid, RScript, Rainworx, Kaqoo, Auction-Express, Bidware, NetAuctionHelp, and xcAuctions are the ones I noted seeing; there were some that may have been phpauction.

The one AJ site I noted was Jorbid.com - a site now defunct and up for sale by GoDaddy. Nevertheless, the person who chose that software claimed to be a php programmer and may have had good reason to choose it. Post here:
http://www.powersellersunite.com/viewtopic.php?t=16690

Though he hasn't been around much, he might get a pm alert if you sent him a question.

I no longer recall how I knew he was using AJSquare - may have been a copyright on the site, may have been something he said, may have been that I looked at example sites from the AJ site.

*added* This google search looks for a pattern I identified, so the resulting sites **might** (and I stress might) be using AJSquare:
http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3A%2Fdetail.php%3Fitem_id%3D

If you haven't heard of Rainworx there is a discussion somewhere here I had with a fella who seemed tech-savvy about why he chose it. You could search that word here.

PHPpro is by far the most frequent one I run into, RScript has things people once liked a lot, but some owners found the tech support poor and frustrating. The once free phpauction has recently changed their software to a paid model and posted briefly about that here. Haven't seen an auction software discussion in some time, so things may be different now.

Hope this helps a bit.

tallship

Hey thanks Purple! As always you provide great pointers for my continuing research and that's greatly appreciated, as well as productive for me.

Sometimes (as exists earlier in this thread) I see posts with unqualified subjectivity that would be better left skipped over. Nothing wrong with subjectivity - that's what is expected when questions asking for opinions are posed, although when those opinions don't answer why or how they came to those conclusions it's almost better left unsaid ;)

There's a reason why AJ isn't mentioned much and doesn't appear to be prominent. It may be because the inexpensive 'user' licensed version (one domain) is without source, or perhaps it just plain sux, or it may be because it hasn't been around for very long.

I doubt it is because of the latter. One thing I've noted about the product, when working inside their demo, is the lack of prowess wrt the English language - a very bad thing for the public to see on a hard-coded website.

Dunno if AJ is an inferior product, but the company is definitely an offshore churner of software spinning out things identified in the market as in demand, and with a catalog as large as theirs is in the enterprise arena one has to wonder if their quality is as much a priority as the quantity of products.

Had a company that we got bamboozled by a few years back. They were actually a respected midwest software company called Fourth Shift. Their sales team was so phenomenal, as were their sales engineers, that I actually made the recommendation to my client to go with them for the MRP platform as they began to retire their swelling SBT based system which was supported by a single programmer out of Laguna Beach (I actually recommended against retiring their existing SBT based platform, but they were insistent, so I scouted out alternative solutions).

Once the client had invested a couple of million dollars on a build out of their machine room, complete with the latest quad Xeon intel servers I built and loaded up with Exchange, SQL Server, SMS Server, Domain Controllers, Citrix servers, and complimentary software such as BackupExec and many many other expensive licenses, we discovered that Fourth Shift wasn't working - they were touting 32 bit apps and full support for MS SQL Server, etc., and much of the core was still 16 bit.

Not only that, but we had to run Titanium (more license purchases just to get Fourth Shift to hobble along) and let the expensive SQL Server licenses lie dormant, and even though I insisted that all departments in the company duplicated all of their work to maintain both envioronments running in parallel, the regressioin back to SBT was a nightmare (would you do your work twice if you didn't think there was a point to it?).

But the 'stuff' hit the fan when I reached my last straw over Fourth Shift sending out their uber high dollar 'engineers' to exclaim that bottlenecks in my newly upgraded network backbone were the culprit - hogwash, and I was backed up by the Citrix engineers, intel engineers, and my buddies at Fluke (I ran redundant and unnecessary fiber to every single building and departmental closet they had - there wouldn't be any bottlenecks for at least ten years, and you could have moved a Jersey cow through their network unnoticed!!!).

Eventually, I re-purposed those beautiful, huge intel (NorthTech branded) servers and built a nice Samba environment for storage and Sendmail for communications and other transparent UNIX solutions (costing them only for the labor and not more licenses), but the damage of having purchased all those Microsoft and other licenses for an MRP and Accounting system that didn't work and was quickly becoming obsolete had been done.

The SBT consultant in Laguna was, however, very happy that I saved his biggest contract and always referred me to his clients after that).

My client was eventually happy too, since the extra horsepower on an order of magnitude enabled them to eventually realize that their old environment was costing them less than Fourth Shift ever would have.

Fourth Shift was a good product, it just wasn't ready for prime time.

In the end, the only thing the client actually kept in production were the Citrix servers, since they had gone multi-national at that point.

I know I got off on a tangent there, but I think the moral of the story is, use qualified recommendations, spend the time doing your research, and most importantly, count how many people are actually using a particular product without contemplating suicide:)

Again, thanks for your pointers and I'm on my way to follow those breadcrumbs now...........

purple_reading_giraffe · Joined: 04 Feb 2008 Posts: 5485 Location: Indiana, USA

Thanks for the story :)

While I didn't completely follow it, I still found it interesting and educational. Now do me a favor, go read these threads and see if you can provide me some breadcrumbs. ;)

http://www.powersellersunite.com/viewtopic.php?t=29924&postdays=0&postorder=asc&&start=15#281084

http://www.powersellersunite.com/viewtopic.php?t=29966&postdays=0&postorder=asc&&start=0#281401

I think you might have a clue about what I'm trying to find, though I suspect wphamilton may as well. Maybe the two of you can point me in the right direction. :)

tallship · Posted: Mon Oct 19, 2009 12:18 am Post subject:

purple_reading_giraffe wrote (View Post): › docWrite("quote")

Now do me a favor, go read these threads and see if you can provide me some breadcrumbs. ;) ...

...I think you might have a clue about what I'm trying to find...

Well, I have an idea. The notion I'm getting is that people want a method to scrape listing data from a site (in this case ecrater), manipulate that data, and lay it out into a database as information that can be used to place it somewhere else (into a special database, such as a CSV, pipe delimited file or (PostGre/My)SQL database), where the human can manipulate that information and then run a script to insert it into a database on a store/auction site.

If that's the case, the first thing I think of, is NOT to recreate the wheel, and begin tying some tools together, and then write a script to pull the data from your client database so you can bulk upload/insert it into the vendor's (store/auction site) database - not a trivial matter.

But in my thinking, here's where I would start looking, gathering sample data, and then seeing how that data might be manipulated, with the desired portions retrieved being kept and used for your purpose:

ht://Dig is an old standard: http://www.htdig.org/ (works good, some people say it's dated, but that's only because HTML hasn't changed much. A very mature product)

Alkaline is what I used to do when I ran a few search engine sites that indexed selected entire ccTLD Top-Level Domains we would pull DNS zonefiles for the TLDs, feed the domains to Alkaline and it would just go and go and go. Nowadays it's free, but development is rather stagnant/frozen at this time: http://alkaline.vestris.com/

I also used MnoGoSearch with UDMsearch. There is still very active support and development, and this might be your best bet for something mature and extremely extensible: http://www.mnogosearch.org/

It looks like UdmSearch has evolved since last I used it. A good place to begin planning the possibilities would be: http://freshmeat.net/search?q=mnogosearch&submit=Search

And then there's a newer player on the block called PhpDig, probably very good, but I haven't used it: http://www.phpdig.net/

"IF" I'm correct in what you're looking to do, the facts are that it will require almost as much effort to create this type of import/export system for a single user as it will to just index everything on the site and create a subscription based service that anyone can use for bulk uploading/revising of their item listings. As far as a spider is concerned in the grand scheme of things, ecrater is a very small place to point one of these puppies at, and once you tune one of them to index just your own listings (we need a key to work with that ecrater exposes, such as your store name or sellername), it would be extremely fast.

There are links at the MnoGoSearch site to several niche search engines that you might find impressive.

So it would go like this

1.) index ecrator for particular criteria

2.) extract the data you want and place it into a special database (You like spreadsheets?)

4.) feed a custom script (doesn't this already exist for ecrater?) which uses your uid/pwd at ecrator from your custom database and your listings will be bulk revised/added. The custom script can be a spartan executable if ecrater doesn't already have an import feature built into their system.

Am I close?

purple_reading_giraffe · Joined: 04 Feb 2008 Posts: 5485 Location: Indiana, USA

Sounds like you are very close. But I would think there ought to be something even easier.

If XML and RSS are data formats, why can't I find something simple that can just convert RSS to a simple spreadsheet?

I feel like there must be something glaringly obvious that I just don't know where to look for. DiscountSilver925 made a suggestion that seems obvious and simple, but that I cannot implement using OpenOffice. RSS info talks about XML and OpenOffice talks about XML but OO doesn't open RSS in any useful way that I can figure out.

I'm starting to feel very stupid, actually.

Nevertheless, RSS will only give me what the site decides to put in the feed, so I probably would still need the things you linked and which I will look into tomorrow. Thanks.

tallship

I haven't actually looked to see what ecrater will provide via RSS, but my concern is that particulars such as shipping, etc., aren't going to be there. But regardless of whether you are able to index things with a spider, you're still going to have issues with features such as make offer, since the settings that the seller makes for acceptable ranges, for example, are never going to be released publicly on the site, since that would defeat the purpose.

And with several thousand listings... Well that's a lot of revisions for those hidden attributes that must be dealt with at some point.

The best thing indeed is if ecrater has some sort of utility that will provide the seller with ALL of their listing data via XML, which I doubt they do, since the purpose behind the existence of this discussion wouldn't exist if it did ;)

DaLizardsLair · Joined: 15 Feb 2009 Posts: 4780

PRG,

Perhaps this will help you some.

http://www.netimechannel.com/OnlineRssViewer/

purple_reading_giraffe · Joined: 04 Feb 2008 Posts: 5485 Location: Indiana, USA

Thanks for the suggestion, DaLiz. However, what I may need is an RSS reader that will see the data fields as data fields and export the result to some Tab Delimited or CSV format, not one that puts it right back into HTML. :)

@tallship - looking at your suggestions, it sounds like I need to use any one of them on a server, unless WindowsXP can pretend to be an NT server now. Also it sounds as if they are just going to index pages by keywords and not necessarily allow me to pull individual bits of data from the page, except maybe for the $1000 one.

Sheesh - where did GoogleDocs get those commands and why can't I find a version of those commands in OpenOffice Calc or Base? I have found software that will convert CSV to RSS but none yet that say they will convert it the other way. :roll:

It really was not that hard to use the GoogleDocs formulas to do what I wanted, but the limitation is so small I could only pull full (public) info for about 3 items at a time, and just Title Price and Description info for about 15. That's not that useful and would require a lot of copy and paste and reassembly.

j&gsales · Joined: 18 Aug 2008 Posts: 238

what is it exactly that you are trying to do here?

purple_reading_giraffe · Joined: 04 Feb 2008 Posts: 5485 Location: Indiana, USA

purple_reading_giraffe wrote (View Post): › docWrite("quote") http://www.powersellersunite.com/viewtopic.php?t=29924&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15#281084
http://www.powersellersunite.com/viewtopic.php?t=29966&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0#281401 Cross Reference to more appropriate threads.