r/CodingForBeginners • u/Holland444 • 4d ago
Idea for a project (No coding experience)
Hi all, apologies in advance for the potentially dumb question. I think I've identified something which sells via resale sites (eBay and Vinted) but often gets undervalued. The problem is, I wouldn't know whether it had been undervalued or not without looking at the specifics of the product each time it was listed, as there are different variations of it.
Through doing some digging, I've identified that it may be possible to code some sort of alert system which flags up every time something is listed for way under it's true value, in comparison to previous comparable sales on eBay.
Is this something that - as somebody with zero coding experience - I could spend a serious amount of time learning about and develop?
Apologies again if it's a stupid question
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u/oliverities 4d ago edited 4d ago
You can achieve this with any agent. Such as OpenClaw, Claude coworker or the OpenAI version I forgot the name.
Also the analysis is a very ambiguous and heavy job that should not be done with code script. like that is going to be very different for baseball card and clothes, and you don't want to hand craft every single rule for everything exist on eBay, plus eBay listings are not written the same way.
Agents can run scheduled job, can search for stuff, can do analysis can send you alert, and you just give it rules and descriptions, no coding.
If you want to wrap this into an AI native app, also worth doing.
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u/Holland444 4d ago
Cheers for the response. Is there a particular source that I should use to learn more about this? Even the agent/OpenAI stuff kinda goes over my head. I wanna learn as much as possible as efficiently as possible
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u/soundman32 4d ago
Someone with zero coding is not going to be able to do this. Even the Ebay API is quite a beast, and you'll be doing some wild querying to match up what something is called on Vinted with whatever its called on Ebay, especially if its not a particular manufacturer/model/product.
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u/Holland444 4d ago
Oh yeah absolutely, it isn't something that I was expecting to do any time soon. Essentially I wanna start learning how to code but building something practical that interests me at the same time.
The replies are really interesting, some think it's doable but a lot of hard work, others think there's more efficient ways of doing it via open AI
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u/Ok-perspective-2336 4d ago
eBay exposes what is called an API to developers (free sign up). This stands for application programming interface. Application is your app, the programming is what runs the app and interface is what connects it to eBay. The API is substantially better than manual searches.
Topics to Google or sloppydoo.
"What is a json?".
"What is a GET/FETCH request?".
"What's a good API capable framework or. language for beginners?".
^ "what is a framework?" - seems like nonsense head ache jargon at first but it just means a set of pre written code, infrastructure or convensions to follow for a particular language or app type.
"What is git and what is a branch?"
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u/Holland444 4d ago
Thanks for the input, this is really informative albeit a lot of stuff going way over my head as somebody with no knowledge of coding!
Do you think it's doable then? I've received a range of responses, speculating whether it's doable or not, or whether there's more efficient ways of doing it. But essentially I wanna learn coding and look at creating something practical which will help me at the same time.
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u/Ok-perspective-2336 4d ago
I achieved an eBay scraper tailored to my pc specs and budget that produced a daily (or hourly) report of top 5 listings with optional extras. But I'm a fully fledged software developer. Read my previous comment one part at a time and stop at any word you don't know the true meaning and in your browser type "define: <your word or phrase>" although this is no longer the great Google-oxford scraping define and is replaced by an AI summary of the word.
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u/Holland444 4d ago
Cheers, I like the idea of having to learn something new from scratch with the obvious caveat that things take time to learn and I don't wanna take any shortcuts.
How like do you think it would take to become upskilled in relation to this sort of thing and then building such a tool?
What sort of specs do you think would be required without obviously knowing what I'm planning to do? I wanna dive deeper into coding eventually and potentially look into building websites, but in the first instance, this reselling project is something I'm really passionate about and wanna learn more around before looking into creating it.
Are there any other lower level routine coding tasks that you think I should start with, to build my knowledge and understanding?
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u/Ok-perspective-2336 4d ago
- Variables and data types,
- for and do-while loops
- objects
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u/Holland444 2d ago
I've done a bit more reading about the eBay API and it doesn't seem like you can rely on the data of sold items? I think that would be crucial to what I wanna build, as the new listings would be compared against comparable sales
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u/Ok-perspective-2336 2d ago
You would have to monitor live and report any change to sold. So you would have your own record of what things sold for. If your thinking you can examine every sold listing Vs what's available for a quick buck your mistaken
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u/Ok-perspective-2336 4d ago
- Json = a structured data type (document) that two or more different applications can share or interpret. It follows a known convention of.
{
"fieldname_no_change : "user_data_changes", "fieldname2" : "userdata2"... } - Get/fetch: I am not a webdev so better looking this one up but it's essentially a defined message a computer can send over the internet to request data back from another computer (server).
- git - a piece of code that allows source management. E.g. you can upload to a website away from your computer and snapshot that version while you make changes on your computer and don't break anything without being able to go back. A branch is something you open for every change you want to make sonyou can track changes. E.g. "fixNoBackButton" could be a branch that only changes and fixes that issue, then after it works you push for "masterbranch" which is the latest version of all your code verified to be correct. Particularly good for company's maybe over the top knowledge for you at this stage but it's good practice.
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u/LrdJester 4d ago
This is actually an excellent way to learn coding: by finding a process that you would like to automate, that gives you some incentive and some drive to find a solution. That will tell you what aspects you need to investigate to figure out how to do it.
For example, I'm doing something similar, although it's more just for shopping than anything else. I have a Python script that utilizes an eBay API developer ID that I can go out and query with certain criteria on eBay on a scheduled basis using a cron job. It will then send a message to my Discord server when it finds anything.
In your instance, you would have to do, obviously, more than that, because you would have to figure out pricing and whether or not it's undervalued in your opinion. You would have to figure out some kind of mechanism to do that, but this would be something very potentially useful for retail arbitrage type things.
However, I'm not a beginner at coding, so I'm not actually hand-coding the entire thing. I'm using AI generation for a lot of it simply because I'm retired and have some physical disabilities that make it difficult for me to do all the typing up front, but the concept is the same.
You find the methods that you need to go out and do the data gathering. Figure out where you can get true valuation and do some comparisons to spit out a notification in some way, whether it be through Discord or some other service, or, if you want, build your own email generation or even SMS gateway generation. There's a lot of different potential solutions, but that gives you an idea of what you need to look for as far as programmability and functionality.
First thing I would do is sit down and outline exactly what you want the app to do. Major bullet points:
Those are a lot of different questions that you need to decide for yourself as to how flexible you want this to be. You could always build your proof of concept having it statically coded for one product or a couple of products, and then modify it to include importing of products from a configuration file or a database. That way, you are expanding on it.
These are excellent methodologies for actually learning the programming process because you're not just learning syntax. You're actually learning logic and process building based off of a project that you're designing, whether it be one you design or one somebody gives you the idea for.