Bid Hero

Bid Hero was submitted and approved to the Chrome extension store

I added a few more pages to the main site but I'm not that happy with them. I'm leaving them as they are for now though as I'm not going to market this thing for now so I'm guess no one will ever see them.

I've been adding some more features.

Settings

• How many sold items must have gone for cheaper before it tells you not to bid

Custom search

• There were quite a few times a very specific item name didn't find any results. You can now modify the search

On page alerts
You now get warnings on things like:

• Low seller feedback
• Bad seller feedback
• Item ending early in the morning (so likely to go for cheaper)
• Condition vs description checks - E.g. get a warning when the condition is 'New' but the description includes the word 'damaged'

I've been using it more and more and finding more and more helpful. I actually get annoyed when I'm out and get an eBay alert on my phone saying an auction is ending soon as I can't use Bid Hero to check on my mobile.

Maybe that's next then. A mobile app...

I've managed to decide on a name 'Bid Hero' and a domain (via a domain hack) bidhe.ro which I am happy with. I wasn't sure if I was going to bother with this first of all but the Chrome extension needed a few links so why not.

I need to look into how to build better landing pages, especially the copy but it looks OK for now.

Ebay's API is a little odd and takes some getting used to. They have a lot of different endpoints and it's a pain to work out which one to use for which search. I think I have it now.

Creating the extension wasn't actually very hard but I wanted to support more than just Chrome. Then I found webextension-toolbox which is awesome. It allows you to build an extension which works on multi browsers and swapping to it was simple (replace any calls to chrome to browser. Standing on the shoulders of giants.

I have everything working for ebay.co.uk and I've actually used the extension in development mode quite a bit in the last week. It's actually as helpful as I thought it would be. Cool.

I use eBay a try and buy old video games any vinyls. Nothing that I 'need' so I only ever bid when the item is going for cheap. The thing is, some items (Looking at you Conker's bad fur day on the N64) can go for quite a bit of money... so how much was cheap?

I kept wanting to know if bidding was a good idea or if I was paying over the odds. Ebay allow you to look at items which have sold in the last 90 days which is great but doing that search every time was quite cumbersome and not an exact science.

Annoying repetitive tasks always get me thinking and then the idea came to me. Make a browser extension that will do the searching for me. Show me the current item at it's current amount in a list of similar sold items so I can see if it's a good deal.

I'll make it for myself, if it helps anyone else that's a bonus.