Game Hunting on Ebay

[bekindpleaserewind]

I thought this open source program I wrote for myself would be useful to people who hunt for games on Ebay. In a nutshell, it automates monitoring the Ebay API for gaming related items you have configured it to monitor for. It provides desktop, audible and Slack notifications for new items matching your search criteria and gives you a significant advantage over manually monitoring the Ebay's webiste for new games. It updates as often as every 60 seconds (depending on how many searches you have configured). I published it on Github at https://github.com/bekindpleaserewind/gamefinder. The newest release can always be downloaded from https://github.com/bekindpleaserewind/gamefinder/releases. As of now I have it working on both Windows and Mac (it is a Python application) and I've provided a native window binary as well (compiled with pyinstaller). Here is a screenshot to get an idea of what I'm talking about. If you have any questions, comments, etc. please let me know. I'm always looking for feedback and ideas and hope someone else finds this as useful as I have.

[marurun]

Wow, this is a really cool thing you've made. It makes me wonder if this could be turned into a local web app so mobile users could use it without forcing you to have an app store account.

[bekindpleaserewind]

It is actually a desktop app, runs on windows and mac right now, haven't tested on Linux yet. It sits in your system tray monitoring and notifying you as you configure it to in the settings (Desktop popups, audio alerts or Slack (or all of the above)).

It helps me grab good listings (especially for lots) before other people because they show on the API by a few minutes normally vs. the website that everyone else is monitoring. For example I picked up some lots of SNES games for about $140, worth around $400 in pricecharting. Couple of rare games as well this way!

[Note]

This seems like a great tool, thanks for sharing!

I haven't used anything like this before, so I'll have to read up on how to get it running on a Mac.

[bekindpleaserewind]

It should run cleanly on mac from source using python3.

You can follow these instructions:

Source
If you're running through source, you need to go through the following steps:

Install the pip modules by running pip install -r pip.txt. I recommend doing this is a venv dedicated to Gamefinder.
Ensure that the alerts/icons directories are in the same location as the source code (it is auto resolved in path.py).
Execute python gamefinder.py.

I think mac requires one thing not documented which is installing audio support for the pip modules from brew (I'll have to ask my buddy what package he needed to install to get it running right).

Otherwise it ran great on mac as far as I was told.

[bekindpleaserewind]

I updated the README with running from source instructions on Mac at https://github.com/bekindpleaserewind/g ... source-mac

[bekindpleaserewind]

Updated Gamefinder to now include the ability to modify search criteria!

The most recent version, v1.1.2-beta, is at https://github.com/bekindpleaserewind/gamefinder/releases/tag/v1.1.2-beta

Binary for Windows 11 is available and source for Windows and Mac is also usable.

I also wanted to point out you can run OR, AND as well as NOT searches on eBay to target specific lots of games.  For example, if you wanted to search for "(chrono trigger OR contra iii) AND NOT Super Famicom AND NOT CIB" you could use the following as search criteria: ("chrono trigger","contra iii") -famicom -cib

Combine this method of searching into a single configured platform to limit how many API calls you utilize since the eBay API currently limits the finding API to 5000 requests a day.

Future roadmap includes updating to the newer RESTful API and ditching the Finding API.