Hi,

Could somebody tell me whether the current version uses the eBay APIs available through their developer portal or if it uses some form of HTML scraping? Is this information publicly available anywhere? Thankss very much

I gather from the news announcements that it still uses some form of HTML scraping but I haven’t been able to find this stated explicitly anywhere? Also, if this is the case could anyone tell me why? What advantages are there to this approach over using eBay APIs? Thanks

Ebay specifically doesn’t allow sniping software to use the API.

Yours
Ivan

Ah, thanks very much I had been under the impression that eBay was okay with sniping.

Is this in the eBay Developers Program & API License Agreement? I can’t seem to find any reference to sniping in any of eBay term’s and conditions?

Thanks again

I don’t know where it says so but it’s been mentioned several times both here on this forum and on the forums of other sniping software.

Yours
Ivan

Still, this limitation could be bypassed by creating some other program, that does not snipe at all (perhaps just monitor auctions and present some averages, alerts, or something like that), perpahs it won’t even have the ability to place a bid. But as a “side effect”, it would present all the necessary information in some more stable format (XML exports, SOAP queries, etc …). JBidwatcher can then use that as the information source, though some HTML scraping would still be needed to place the bid.

Perhaps this rule is unwritten – you won’t know it until eBay suspends your API access cause they don’t like the sniping….