eBay Hacks
// February 1st, 2005 // No Comments » // Uncategorized
My Amazon order arrived today – a day or two earlier than I expected, but I can’t moan at that 
.
The first book I’ve read already, eBay Hacks is basically a tip book for eBayers, both buyers and sellers, though to be honest it’s not really worth getting unless you wish to sell. It contains a 100 tricks, ranging from the common sense “beware of off eBay sales” to the more useful “automatically leave feedback”. Some of these tricks are ‘offline’ hacks – better ways to handle post office queues, others are technical hacks – run this perl code to automatically submit listings. One very useful section is the photography section. It contains tricks and tips to get 3d images on your auctions, basic photography techniques and similar items. This can save you over 15p an auction, which may not sound much, but it all adds up.
As a whole I feel that this book has a problem deciding who it’s audience is. Some of it is soley useful to large ‘power sellers’ or the technical crowd, others are of no use to any experienced eBayer. I suspect that many of the technical users could figure out the ways of using the eBay API anyway, while the example scripts given aren’t feature-rich enough to be of any real use to power sellers. Another problem with this book (at least for me!) is it’s US-centric, there are several tips devoted to shipping, and nearly all of them are useless outside the US
I don’t think this book is worth the £17 full price, and to be honest I’d struggle to reccomend it at the £12 it is at now. However you may be able to find some bargains at the Amazon Marketplace.
