Research API Cooking Class

Session 103: Expanding Your Business into New Markets with eBay Market Data

103: Expanding Your Business into New Markets with eBay Market Data

Speaker:

Laura Della Torre, Market Development Senior Manager, Developers Program, eBay
Anthony Sukow, CEO, DataUnison
Jord Tanner, Director of Data Services, DataUnison

The gold standard of eCommerce information, eBay Market Data provides rich transactional supply and demand data including what's for sale, who's buying, and for how much. Access to this marketplace intelligence can help you create more robust applications regardless of whether you do business on or off eBay. In this session, you will learn how the Market Data Program works, what information is available, the many new products available this year, and how you can make more money using them. Real-world examples illustrate how others are using eBay Data to conduct factual analysis, build pricing guides, identify market gaps, decide which merchandising features work best, and help sellers better understand marketplace dynamics. eBay Developers Conference 2006

Our examples will show how easy it is to get up an running with the API. We will show an Apache/PHP example, a REST with XSL HTML example, and a REST with XSL Microsoft Excel example. Below we have proved some links to resources and code samples so you can try out the examples yourself.

The first step is to signup for a Sandbox API account. Once you are signed up you can use the example code linked below to start your research application.

Traditional Apache/PHP Implementation
basic.zip provides a self contained PHP implementation. Simple place it on a PHP enabled web server, follow the documentation in the README file, and you are ready to go. PHP can be downloaded from php.net. The Apache web server is popular, and is available for many platforms. It is available from httpd.apache.org

XSL HTML Implementation
If you don't want to configure a web server, you can use our XSL implementation. The search results are still displayed in a web browser, but you don't need to run a web server to make it happen. Simply unzip our XSL HTML sample code, place your tokens in the research_app.js file, then open research.html in your browser (Internet Explorer only at this time).

XSL Excel Implementation
With two simple files you can display research data right in Microsoft excel. Unzip our xsl_excel.zip, place your tokens in the api_query.iqy file, then open that file in Excel.