[ic] Ebay auctions and Interchange

[Grant]

>First let me say how impressed I am with Interchange.
>Second let me apologize if this issue has been addressed earlier and I
>didn’t find it in my searches.
>Now, to the point.  I want Interchange to manage my auctions on Ebay,
>Yahoo etc.  Most importantly I want for my auction customers to be able
>to checkout via Interchange.  This will give my website greater
>exposure, and give me the opportunity to upsell my customers.  In
>addition I want Interchange to manage starting auctions, notifying
>winners, collecting money, and shipping goods. What I am envisioning is
>integrating the services of Andale or the like into Interchange.   I am
>open to suggestion, but I envision items in Interchange with auction
>metadata including type of auction, buy it now price, description,
>auction schedules etc.  I want Interchange to automatically post the
>auctions according to these schedules.  I envision auctions with a link
>for the winner to follow which takes them to the Interchange checkout
>which will upsell, calculate shipping, handling, and tax.   I want items
>to be sold at auction, at the web store, or both.  I don’t care all that
>much about paypal since I have a credit merchant account.     I realize
>this is a lot to ask, but who knows.
> It seems to me that someone out there must have Perl modules to parse
>winning notifications from Ebay and maybe even to post auctions, so it
>seems that the work would be in integrating that into Interchange.  I
>think that Interchange already has the flexibility to do the rest fairly
>easily.
> So, has anyone done this?  Has anyone considered this?  Is anyone even
>interested?  Would I be crazy to consider doing it myself?  I have a cs
>degree, have built custom shopping carts, and even integrated Mailman
>(this mailing list software) with oracle and LDAP, but I do not
>understand Interchange well enough to estimate how much work is
>involved.  For you consultants out there, how much would it cost to pay
>for this?  If I pay for it I would insist that it be returned to the
>community.  Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
>Cheers,
> Andy

I've actually been thinking about this a lot lately, and *conceptually* this
is what I've come up with:

1. import all Interchange items as auction items into your auction
management system (I like ChannelAdvisor)
2. have items with an inventory greater than 0 listed on the auction sites
of your choice
3. after an auction purchase is made, the automatic auction email is sent to
the purchaser with a link to the special IC auction page (auction.html)
4. on auction.html, the purchaser enters their auction item number and the
sku of the item they won
5. the customer is then taken to the Your Cart page with the appropriate
item in their cart
6. the customer then has the option to "continue shopping" or "checkout"
7. each day, a fresh items file is imported into ChannelAdvisor and all
currently unlisted items with an inventory greater than 0 are listed at
auction
8. after processing any order, check to see if it was for an auction (the
info could have been set in a table and included in the report email) and
mark that transaction as complete in ChannelAdvisor and leave feedback
9. ChannelAdvisor sends emails to late checkouts and NPBs to deadbeats

This means you would need to:

1. get IC to export items file and (as you said) include auction specific
information in the products.txt info
2. set up the auction.html page to add the sku entered into the cart and
record the auction number
3. set up ChannelAdvisor (or other auction management service) the way you
want it

Now, this is what I've come up with due to my very limited IC skills.  It's
based around being relatively easy to implement.  I'd love to hear about
other possible systems that are smoother and more efficient, or critiques of
this system.

- Grant