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Can automator do this (or something else)

6

6163621

Cancelled
Original poster
Jan 13, 2004
208
96
Hi.. something that would give me brownie points with the wife. She sells some stuff on a small eBay like site BUT there is no listings agent so things have to be done by hand.

Relisting things is a pain as again one has to click on several links to relist each item that wasn't sold in a given time.

Now is there anyway to automate this, as so far I am automated to do the relisting for her. Many fields are constant but a bit of error trapping is good.

Desirable would be to take a URL from an email address (the unsold item that they email to you), open it, click on a given button, click on another given button and wait for a confirmation text and then go on to the next one in the list (it could be from a mail folder in Mail or some other format).

Is there any way to save me almost "doing this in my sleep" as she gives me a few hundred items to do each week :)

I cannot see how to program it in automator though! Thanks...
 
I am quite a fan of Automator and am interested in helping but I think I need to understand what you are doing in better detail.

So you get an Email, and you need to extract a URL out of it.
Is this URL completely different everytime? Does the URL contain any similar words or letters?

What programs are being used? An email program obviously and a browser I'd assume. What are they, and anything else?

I think we can figure something out.
 
Thank you. This is kind. Should we go to PM?

Essentially, how things work/how I envisage things would work/workflow.

1. Log in to service (one time event for session irrespective of how many items / transactions one does).
2. I have already copied over relevant messages into a dedicated folder "to relist" (example) i.e. 50 messages.

--up to here I guessed these would be manual tasks--

3. Each message contains one dedicated URL which is the same save for the reference number, but this is clickable by the mail program.
4. Upon clicking the link it goes to the regular (closed) auction.
5. Click one link (fixed text) to "relist"
6. Read through and (if one wanted, but for automatic relisting one wouldn't, edit parts of the auction) then click a (fixed text)link to submit.
7. Auction now previewed. Click (fixed text) link to accept.
8. Item relisted, fixed text to say "relisted" if required for succesful validation, so one could see if something failed (i.e. category changed).

9. It would be nice if possible to then move the processed email into say a "processed" folder for safety.


Is that too ambitious ?

Many thanks in advance for any pointers.

6163621
 
The meaning is more that one doesn't abuse the forum by lots of "try this" plus I might not be comfortable with personally identifiable information being posted through the URLs. However, of course, if the original poster or anyone else can assist, it would be correct to show the solution, albeit with the URLs being partially mangled for obvious reasons.

Nothing more, nothing less.
 
Evangelion said:
If you do that, then others could not learn from this discussion
Click to expand...
Yeah I agree.
But yeah, I'll take a look at what I can figure out 6163621.

But so you know, Automator works by programs mainly. So what programs are you using? I don't need the process as much as what each program needs to do.
 
Thanks. Regular Apple Mail and Safari under 10.4.7 PowerPC.

TVM !

I looked at automator but boggled as it seemed very difficult :)
 
Sadly iSale is for eBay only from what I could determine (had looked when it was first launched as I used another eBay lister and just checked and it is eBay only still.

Thanks for the lead tho..
 
Sorry, but I'm not sure that I can do anything with Automator. One of the things is that I really don't get what you are doing. And I haven't the time right now to go about trying to figure it out.

I do encourage you to give Automator a try, cause it really is helpful and really isn't that hard. There is a tutorial in the help menu that takes about 4 minutes to do, and you can figure a few things out from it.
 
6163621 said:
Sadly iSale is for eBay only from what I could determine (had looked when it was first launched as I used another eBay lister and just checked and it is eBay only still.

Thanks for the lead tho..
Click to expand...

I'm sorry, I should have read your OP more carefully. I don't think it's feasible to do what you need with Automator. AppleScript might be more practical. Automator just isn't flexible enough (although it really is easy to use if you take a few minutes to get a feeling for it).
 
NO PROBLEM. might have been me. But I don't like selling on eBay. Too much hassle for little reward often (plus the fees for even listing when it doesn't sell!). Shame though:
 
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