[ic] Ebay auctions and Interchange

[Andy Lowe]

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


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