Technically I had ai help me create this script, but I’ve made the script in python and autohotkey in the past.

When I’m researching an item I look up the current listings and sold listings as well as on eBay’s product research page.

Instead of going to each page and typing in search and then filtering by sold, I made a script which takes a search term and opens up a new window with three tabs with the search already completed for current, sold, and research.

#!/bin/bash

# Join all arguments into a single string
search_term="$*"

# URI-encode the search term
encoded_term=$(printf '%s' "$search_term" | jq -sRr @uri)

# Open Chromium with a new window and search eBay
chromium --new-window "https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=%24encoded_term" "https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=%24encoded_term&rt=nc&LH_Sold=1&LH_Complete=1" "https://www.ebay.com/sh/research?marketplace=EBAY-US&keywords=%24encoded_term" &

wait

Edit: added wait command, changed to chromium web browser, added --new-window and put all urls on the same command, changed to & instead of &&

The way this works is that it is placing the search term you enter into the url and just loading the url without having to interact with the search bar on the website at all.

If you look at the url when you search “baked beans” you can see the words “baked beans” in the url: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=baked+beans

you can then replace the words with different words and automatically load search results that way. I then created a helper script and bound it to a keyboard shortcut. So now when I press my shortcut combo it opens up a terminal and asks for my search term:

#!/bin/bash

# Clear the screen
clear
echo "eBay Item research"
read -p "Enter search term: " term

# Call your real script
~/search_ebay.sh "$term"

Of course these could be one complete script, but I haven’t bothered to combine them and well it works on my machine. I’d love critique and please share any automatons you’ve created to help your workflow!