Expresso Beans is now eBay certified to provide better quality and more reliable listings.
This does little to help the overwhelming manual process the volunteers go through to painfully match eBay auctions with actual prints. Our hats are off to the volunteers!
We do not have any new revenue streams and we only benefit from this in terms of quality of service. We can now update our listings faster and we no longer have to try to parse eBay web pages directly to get the content, a moving target. Hence, this means is that our service quality has increased for the long run.
As a side-effect of the certification process, members will notice a few new eBay logos floating around. These are a certification requirement.
Special thanks to eBay for eliminating the fees from the program which made it possible for us to join.
EBay Certified
I know that as Thomas has said, this isn't any new income for the site or any huge huge change, but I wanted to say thanks to Thomas as well for keeping on top of this possibility and making the connection to reliable data for the site - kudos!
Tra la la la la...
- marshhouse
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I love you guys!!!
Nice work.
Nice work.
Bacon is love.
- Bakedbeens
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many kudos
They do so much with just the notes that they have. I mean who does that? Who messes with that kind of stuff?
- postartproductions
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Flimby wrote:Another positive step. Well done!
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What does this mean to be ebay certified?
Arre we suggesting a new field? I am so farkern wasted right now. Wat is going on? I can;t quite rewad the screen. My copany bought the beer today. - Thomas, founder of EB
- sunsetbrew
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Good question..tastyfresh wrote:What does this mean to be ebay certified?
1. until now we simply parsed the web pages that everyone sees. At most 1000/day because ebay will lock you out if you hit them hard and long thinking you are attacking them.
2. Their developer program allows you to use an XML interface against their system which eliminates the guess work in parsing pages. Plus the system is more zippy than the normal web pages are.
3. They used to charge a lot for the API use, but now it is free.
4. One still must to be certified to use it. Two levels of certification are allowed.
a. self certified for 10,000 hits a month (not nearly enough for us).
b. certified by eBay's staff 1.5 million hits a day limit. We did this.
It was not that hard to do really. I doubt they paid much attention to the code. They were probably more interested in knowing we had a legitimate site, how we intended to use the service, that it is not in conflict with their guidelines, our contact information and make sure we give them credit (logos). We had to be a running example.
Writing and maintaining the page parsers like we were doing before took a lot of time and bit us several times as they changed their page designs.