Please help me with some issues with PHP (data extraction)

Hello,
let me firstly introduce myself - I am Jane - a student of Graphic and Fashion University and with another 3 girls we are creating shirts and fashion jewellery. We would like to create ourselves a blog to propagate our works that we are currently offering only at our town. Well it is not a such big business but we would like to help with one issue. Well despite i have some lessons from informatics I am not able to solve one issue... :( and one friend told me that I should find some help on this forum, so I am asking you for help...

Note: please let me know if this issue needs to hire some IT specialist - if it is harder to solve than i thought...

For our arts and fashion jewellery we mostly use swarovski beads which we buy from ebay. To this days we used excel as a feed to all informations we needed, but it works badly and it was also freezing:( so i was searching and found one script on google which we found as ideal...

you can look here: http://www.qualityunit.com/de/unitminer/web-daten-extraktion-beispiele/webextraktion-ebaycom/

I know that it is possible to run php script stored on FTP so it would be for us much more easier than manually add data to excel.

So If you will run that script above mentioned you will get a .csv file with this header:

Source URL;Category URL;Category Name;Expiration Time;Offer Name;Bid History;Current Bid;Image URL;Image Name;Image Alternative Text

we just need only "Source URL, Offer Name, Current bid, and another four datas from product page. See on this image:

http://jpeg.cz/images/2012/08/04/jSzW1.png (http://jpeg.cz/obrazek/Bf)

The source will be: http://stores.ebay.com/Krustallos/Swarovski-Elements-/_i.html?_fsub=1784020017&_sid=727441457&_trksid=p4634.c0.m322 and we need all product from there (not just 5)


I was trying to run this code (i have just copy it and paste it to three new created files .PHP), I did not change anything. I upload it on FTP, add adress to Safari and nothing happened:(( What I was doing wrong? Would be anyone so so kind to help us?

We would appreciate any help. Thank you.

Jane

P.S.: hope that I explained it right xixi :)

I'm really confused ...

Are you selling your items on ebay, or are you buying
items from ebay and selling them on some other website?

What does that script called webextraktion have to do with anything?
And what role does Excel play? I don't get it.

Are you the buyer or the seller?

I'm really confused ...

Are you selling your items on ebay, or are you buying
items from ebay and selling them on some other website?

What does that script called webextraktion have to do with anything?
And what role does Excel play? I don't get it.

Are you the buyer or the seller?

I am sorry that I explained it wrongly, I am ebay buyer and I just need to extract data from ebay store written above. Those extracted data I use for choosing product I need to buy to create some art or fashion...

Currently role of excel was to add there data (using "link to external data from URLs") but it was slow, making mistakes and my computer was freezing... So I have found above solution as better one, because it probably would create one file with only those datas I need. And in php I would add it to cron so actual data will be available without editing excel URLs when any auction ends or begins. So is that possible? Or I have just a dream?

With thanks... Jane

That link you gave has an RSS feed (XML file):
http://www.ebay.com/sch/Krustallos/Swarovski-Elements-/_i.html?rt=nc&_fsub=1784020017&_rss=1&_rssstore=1

How about a PHP script that reads that XML file periodically and does
something with the data? PHP can grab that XML file data anytime and
you can do whatever you want with it.

Also, for your information, you can use Google Docs Spreadsheet (which is free)
instead of Excel. It's basically the same thing as Excel, but it's online, not on
your PC. Something to think about.

I also tried Google spreadsheet- but there is a limitation for max 50 import XML functions - and there is a 300+ products and i need some information from inside of product (as shown on image above), so that was not for me...

I thought that soucre code on http://www.qualityunit.com/de/unitminer/web-daten-extraktion-beispiele/webextraktion-ebaycom/ is PHP code, so I could use it... That was not right, was it?

I don't know what that script is. Doesn't look like PHP to me.

And when I view the RSS feed (the XML file), it displays 100 items.
It looks like there are only 100. Do you think there should be 300?

Anyhow, PHP can read that XML file and save a CSV file in your website.
You can download that CSV file to your own Excel if you wish.

But, as you say, the RSS feed doesn't have any item details.
So, I guess you're sort of "out of luck".

EDIT:
There is an API that might be useful ... I have no experience with it using PHP:
http://developer.ebay.com/DevZone/XML/docs/WebHelp/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm?context=eBay_XML_API&topic=BrowsingSellerItems



.

Yep, there is currently 361 products (for this url: http://stores.ebay.com/Krustallos/Swarovski-Elements-/_i.html?_fsub=1784020017&_sid=727441457&_trksid=p4634.c0.m322 ) when i click to RSS feed I will get only 100 as you. If any PHP (as you wrote at the end of your reply) will fetch all product of that category, it would be much better solution than excel...

Jane

Oh ok (I have just read your edit), anyway thank you for your help;)
Maybe I will find some solution. So thank you for your time and help again:)

Jane

I guess you'll have to find someone with ebay API experience to write
a PHP script to get "Seller Items". Sorry I can't be of more help on this.

I don't know much about this, and perhaps I'm showing my ignorance, but if you add &_pgn=2 to the end of your link (or RSS feed link) it will provide data from a second page. You could repeat this until it errors out.

I don't know much about this, and perhaps I'm showing my ignorance, but if you add &_pgn=2 to the end of your link (or RSS feed link) it will provide data from a second page. You could repeat this until it errors out.

Unfortunatelly that did not work for me...

Unfortunatelly that did not work for me...

No?

http://stores.ebay.com/Krustallos/Swarovski-Elements-/_i.html?_fsub=1784020017&_sid=727441457&_trksid=p4634.c0.m322&_pgn=3

Ah well..

No?

http://stores.ebay.com/Krustallos/Swarovski-Elements-/_i.html?_fsub=1784020017&_sid=727441457&_trksid=p4634.c0.m322&_pgn=3

Ah well..

Well it works for search, same URL I use in excel. But that does not work for rss and for solution for my problem to catch specific data which I wrote in my first post.

Jane