Assessing prices on eBay

I recently listed my old iPhone for sale on eBay. I wanted to know how much phones were going for. But I didn't just want to peruse the prices; I wanted to plot them and analyze them. Here are the steps I took. They are ugly, but they worked on my system, which is Mac OS X Leopard, Firefox 3, and the Table2Clipboard extension (which you don't really need). I'm interested to hear about better ways to do this.

Do an eBay search.

• search text: iphone 3gs 32
• Preferences: Completed listings
• Preferences: Used
• show 200 results

Copy results to a local file

• create dedicated directory like /Users/exampleUser/ebaySoldPrice
• copy results tables only:

• select a word in the first listing
• from the right click menu, choose table2clipboard/select table
• scroll to end of page,
• shift click in last item to extend selection to include all items,
• right click and choose View selection source
• it takes a while for this window to populate
• Copy, paste and save text as "ebay_search_results.txt"

Clean up the results

• Open a terminal window and type the following commands (you may have to fix line breaks if you copy this text)



• cd /Users/exampleUser/ebaySoldPrice/





• cat ebay_search_results.txt  | sed 's/~//g' | 
  sed 's/<table class="li" r="/~/g' |
   tr  "~" "n" | sed 's/ shipping.*$//' |
    sed 's/([0-9]*).*class="vip">/1~/' |
    grep Sold   | sed 's/<[^$]*$/~/'  | 
  sed 's/Free shipping/$0/' |  sed 's/<[^$]*$/~/' |
   sed 's/<.*$/~na/' | tr "~" "t" 
  >ebay_search_results_cleaned.txt

here's how that breaks down:

• sed s'/\~//g'

                  ### remove any tildes in ad title
  

• tr  "~" "\n"

                  ### replace tildes with newline
  

• sed 's/<table class="li" r="/~/g'

                  ### replace table starts with tildes
  

• sed 's/ shipping.*$//'

                  ### get rid of text after shipping
  

• sed 's/\([0-9]*\).*class\=\"vip\"\>/\1\~/' |

                  ### keep the initial row number, deletes everything else until the title
  

• grep Sold

                  ### limit to items that sold
  

• sed 's/\<[^$]*\$/~/'  |

                  ### delete text between title and price
  

• sed 's/Free shipping/\$0/'

                  ### give free a numerical value
  

• sed 's/\<[^$]*\$/~/'  |

                  ### delete text between price and shipping price
  

• sed 's/<.*$/~na/'

                  ### if price doesn't have a dollar amount, delete text and give it an NA value
  

• tr "~" "\t"

                  ### replace tildes with tabs
  

• >ebay_search_results_cleaned.txt

                  ### direct the output into a file