Hi all, looking for a bit of advice, I have a client that wants me to create an eBay style website in the sense that people can list things to be auctioned and then he’ll take a final value fee.
Though I’m not sure the best way to do this. So once the auction has finished, whoever is the winning bidder will send the amount of whatever the auction finished at, the client will take his cut and then pass the remaining onto the seller. Though having to do this manually will become a big problem, is there a way this could be automated?
You only have to look at eBay to see it can be a complicated process, one where your client has a very real risk of being left out of pocket.
If I was going to do something similar, I would probably push to charge an upfront fee to the ‘lister’. Once the payment has been received, mark the auction as active and display it; like newspaper classifieds.
Are you looking to base the payment process on a particular payment gateway?
Hey guys, thanks for your replied, very helpful indeed. I think the best way forward is for me to build the thing from scratch, that way I know exactly how it was build, etc. Should be at the least an interesting project. Cheers for now
Hey Anthony, thanks for the reply. Yeah that does make sense, I think that’s probably the best way forward - charging an upfront listing fee. In regards to the payment gateway, this is pretty much open to anything at the moment.
There are thousands of ebay clone script out there for sale, even on ebay itself. Check webmaster forum as well. They were selling for few dollars in the last 10 years. They might be free now. Check Ares as well and all script site selling packages. Those packages usually include thousands of clone script for few bucks. Google is your friend…
Probably the last thing you want to do is use some unknown “script”, especially when dealing with payment. Unless your going to comb through and understand the entire thing top to bottom its not worth the risk of some type of unethical behavior being present. Unless its a well known open source project I wouldn’t recommend it.
I saw this yesterday and thought of you - it includes an auction api, which might help you or not (SOAP), but maybe there are other auction apis out there?
