WinWorld

Using Eggdrop App as a virtual yard sale

Written by Jase Clamp Tuesday, 20 September 2011 14:17

General

I've sold my stuff on a number of yard sales throughout my life as I'm sure many have. One thing I never liked was all the effort involved. It don't like how you have to pick everything up and take it outside and potentially tag it. Then if it doesn't sell, you bring it back inside or take it to the thrift shop or dump. Or worse yet, if it rains you run around like crazy with tarps, etc. All this to make a couple hundred bucks (depending on what you're selling).

If you don't want to have a yard sale, there's always eBay. To me, eBay only seems to be for certain things. If you have something unique, valuable and shippable, then eBay is the way to go. A custom guitar for example. If it's a keyboard and mouse combo for $2.50 then eBay is not the way to go since there are 1000s of other sellers and you won't sell your item. The alternative is craigslist. You get to deal locally. To their credit, craigslist has kept things simple. You put in a title, price, description, place and pictures. To me this still seems a little harder than it needs to be. You've got to verify who you are and there are all these rules for posting stuff. A drawback of craigslist is that it seems you only have network marketers and dating services on there any more. They have not evolved.

Here's what I want...

I want a mobile app where all I have to do is take a picture of what I'm selling. That is litterally it. One step. If I want to title and price it, fine, its easy enough to do that quickly. Mobile phones have camera's built in so it just seems like the most logical decision to use them to make it easier to sell stuff. Recently the app "Eggdrop" came out. It seems to be pretty close to what I want. This article is a review of the app plus some things that I did to extend it's functionality into what I wanted.

 

The experience with Eggdrop is as follows, you download the app to your phone, you fire it up and either create an account or connect via Facebook/Twitter. The first thing you're presented with is any items for sale near you. Since it's a new app, it may be that no one near you is using it to sell things so the list may be empty.

The big question in my mind was - does EggDrop list your items for sale on the web? Seeing the desert of ecommerce within their app was a deterent for me using it. If my only avenue for selling something is through their app, I will not sell anything, because not many others use a new app. That is a critical mass problem many many app developers have. Thats the way it is. But... I wanted to test list some items to see if EggDrop would give me some sort of link to a listing page for my account with them.

So I started listing items. I took a picture of my foot and listed it for $100. It was really easy. You take the picture, you put in your title and price and boom. You're done. I loved the simplicity.

I listed another item, a rocking chair. Same deal. I noticed that within the app, after I'd listed items, it would ask if I wanted to promote my sale to my friends on Twitter or Facebook. Bingo I thought - if it's letting me do this, it's going to be posting a web address that my friends can go look at my stuff for sale.

Essentially, I could use it to host the worlds easiest, come-whenever-you-want, 24-7, till-the-cows-come-home, VIRTUAL YARD SALE!

How easy is it to sit in your living room and just point a camera at stuff you're selling. This beats carting stuff out the front door - hands down.

So I clicked the option to promote my item. It took me to a web page with a picture of my item. There was my first name and low and behold, when I clicked that it too me to a listing of all MY items. This was getting really good.

The next day my wife and I set about snapping pictures and listing things we wanted to get rid of.

After we'd each gone around and listed about a dozen items each - I went to our sales listing pages on our accounts. Uh oh. Only four items were listed. Apparently EggDrop only lists your most recent four sales items on their website. In order to give your friends a full list of items, you'd have to post links to all of your items individually.

This is what the single item page looks like:

This is what a multiple listing page looks like:

(Note the limit of four)

Why would they limit it like this?

I think the reason for doing this is to get more people to use their app. I would disagree however. They need to enable more of their database on the web. They need an autosensing IP locator and a map on their home page with dots. Of course the dots should just list items, not people. They also need to list all items on user's listing pages. I think they should also introduce categorization. Once I start listing dozen's of items on my listing page - I'm going to want a way to seperate books from furniture, for example. If someone wants to go ahead and make a purchase, they can then get the app.

I started to think of a way around this

I couldn't get so close to my lazy goal of a almost effort free, virtual yardsale, and then fail. The problem isn't that the items are not viewable on the web for sale, the problem is they are not listed all in one place. Some of the solutions to this that I thought of were... Maybe I could just make a list of URLs and post the on my blog or something. That would not be very attractive however. If I posted titles and pictures also, then that would be more effort than it even takes to post on eBay or Craigslist.

What could be done?

Normally a web service has some sort of "feed" - a feed that lets you pull listings and redisplay them elsewhere. EggDrop is pretty new so I could not find any feeds available.

EggDrop lets you post to Facebook - but Facebook is generally closed behind a login. Twitter however... that is public. So I thought, what if I post ALL of my sales to Twitter. Then I can search twitter and write a script to recombine all of my sale items onto one page. 

So I wrote a PHP script that pulls my Twitter feed using my username. It goes through all my Tweets looking for the hashtag #quicksale

That is the hashtag that EggDrop attaches to all your promotions by default. It then pulls the link to the item out of the tweet.

It downloads the web page for that item. If the page is a listing page, it skips it. If the page is a canceled or expired item, it skips that too. What it does though is saves all the items that are available.

Finally it agregates all those items back into one listing page that looks very similar to the listing page that EggDrop provides (but without the four item limit). Here's a snapshot of the result (downsized):

There's more than four on the page.

My next issue was where to put this. I didn't want to confuse people. I wanted people to just think "this is eggdrop" and if they want to use the app or go further, just just click one of the links like you would on their normal website.

EggDrop has done a great job with this, so I put it on the domain eggdropped.com

The script works for anyone. Just use this format:

http://www.eggdropped.com/index.php?user=yourtwitterhandle

I just want to be really clear, my fear with setting up this script on WinWorld.com or my blog was that I did not want to take away from EggDrop or all the hard work they've done. This is not my thing, it's their thing. I just grabbed my sale item listings and put them all on one page. I hope that more people find the web listings and start using the app because it's very easy to use. All the links on the listing page point back to EggDrop themselves. If anyone at EggDrop sees this and you have questions, please contact me.

My script (above) caches results for 24 hours before automatically renewing them. This is to ease hitting EggDrop's servers and also to speed up the page load. If you need to refresh the cache, just use the following URL format: http://www.eggdropped.com/index.php?user=yourtwitterhandle&refresh=1

Although don't give this URL out because the page load will be too slow.

If you want to test it out, just follow this twitter search and build a page for a user there you see listing more than once: http://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/%23quicksale%20%40eggdropapp