Earlymiser.co.uk Auction Deals

After a long time I have decided to launch a UK auction site. I had intended to launch a full blow UK version of Earlymiser but I had some new thoughts about the comparison shopping market. This site like Shop Sort is based on a single web service (Ebay in this case). So the Earlymiser UK is a much simpler service than the US version. As I mentioned in my Christmas post on Thalasar, I have found the meta shopping experiences provide depth at a significant cost of the overall user experience. It's a natural human instinct to want to provide the most comprehensive list of results but at the same time, it's clear that both the performance overhead in hitting so many web services and the overall page size means that I don't get as much Google love. Google loves small footprint pages and that's not likely to change in the near future. While this site doesn't launch in time for Christmas, it certainly will be available next year and for the future. It's a great way to shop and save some cash. It's designed to be complimentary with Best Buys Zone UK and it focuses specifically on Ebay and auctions. It has a far more coverage of office and industrial supplies which is a new area for me. I suspect that my new shopping service, Zestly is going to take more work than I am anticipating so I am going to be spending my spare time working on it.

Ebay Certified!

After a little bit of work Earlymiser passed Ebay certification. The certification isn't particularly difficult but it requires that you make sure you don't mistreat the Ebay logo and that your calls are well formed. Once certified Ebay makes 1.5 million calls per day available to you. That far exceeds my other providers by a factor of 5. In any case this should stop the Ebay errors where I was using limit of 10,000 queries on a daily basis. A couple of times last week, I hit the limit at 8:30 in the morning.

Using Ebay in a comparison shopping engine

I am one of the very few shopping comparison engines (besides mytriggers.com) which regularly uses Ebay search results. Some people aren't big fans of auctions in comparison engines. I think they have a place and have tried to find that place in my site. For me I deliberately limit the results to Buy It Now results. These results are from vendors that have a Buy it Now price on the item. In other words the price you see at Earlymiser is the price you pay. One thing I dislike about Mytriggers approach to using ebay which lists all the current bids for an item. When you set a trigger at mytriggers - your trigger is activated when the item falls into the price range on the current bid. In other words mytrigger is effectively sending a false buying signal that you can buy the item at that price when all you can actually do is put in a bid. That's why I stay away from auctions without a Buy it Now price. If you wanted to participate in an auction for an item, you would just go to a eBay and participate in an auction. The Buy It Now price represents a real price on an item. This is the first time I have used the Ebay web service program. It takes a little getting used to but frankly it's a very robust API. I need to do the final steps in developer certification (I am self certified right now ~ 10,000 queries a day which even with JPCache on the front end I regularly hit the limit late at night 11:00 PM or so). Remarkably we are having a great deal of success with the eBay program as well. It seems to bring back some great results in some things I wouldn't have guessed such categories as eye makeup