Optimise Repeat External Queries

**sivlin** · 02-12-2011, 08:38 PM

Hello everyone,

I'm looking to see if anyone has any ideas on how I could perform this task faster.

It is as follows:

I have a list of somewhere around 2600 different Ebay titles (my inventory which is always growing) and I made a program that would grab each title separately and query ebay for the results of a search on that title (Checking for competitors). Essentially, what this comes down to is, for each title - my program has to re-query Ebay and this takes forever!

This is the only way I've come up with for doing this, but I'm definitely no guru at excel.

Any ideas floating about? Something I could do that would speed things along? Alternatively, I am not dead set on using Excel as the end all for this program. If you guys think another language might perform this better feel free to make the suggestion and I'll check it out.

Thanks for any responses in advance!

**sivlin** · 02-13-2011, 10:42 PM

bump!

Is anyone familiar with Ebay API? A possible solution to my problem might exist there if anyone has any knowledge of how to import Ebay API variables into an excel spreadsheet.

As it stands, my program takes about 2 hours to query five thousand different searches with all the data manipulation included.

**sivlin** · 02-19-2011, 09:49 PM

In case anyone is curious about doing something similar - I trashed the whole web query concept and ended up using an XML query based around an HTTP GET/POST function created with the Ebay API. More stable, more information from each result and exponentially quicker. Takes about 5 minutes to query the same amount of results as the web query.