The Tool:
I can’t take any credit for finding this tool that I gave a quick glimpse. All credit goes to Andrew Wise founder of Life, Tailored. He and I met up for some coffee last year to discuss points and miles and he mentioned it to me. When I tried it, it was a little buggy and laggy and dismissed it. I’m not sure what came about for me to try it again, but it works like the videos. However, it’s still a little buggy because it is in beta, but it looks very promising and better than when I first tried it. I actually can’t wait for the tool to go live because I have plenty of ideas. Without further ado, the tool is “Kimono Labs.”
Kimono Labs is a tool that scrapes websites of the first level of data, at least that’s as far as I can get it to work. It doesn’t scrape deeper data like on a second page. I’d be more than happy to stand corrected if this is the case. Would save me a lot of work.
From then to now, I didn’t have many ideas for Kimono Labs, but now that the wheels have turned with a successful “project” I have more ideas coming out of Kimono. I’ll leave it as that for now and will talk more about it in a few upcoming posts.
The Data:
I set up the Application Program Interface (API) to download hourly and originally did the “Big 3″ gift card vendors on eBay and have added svmgiftcards (Thanks Noah). I am only using these vendors because they offer “Buy It Now” prices and not the auction prices which makes it far more difficult to ascertain if it’s a deal or not. Below are the links to the API that you can use:
All four are currently configured to run every hour, however, the spreadsheet to view all the data is a manual run.
Here is the link to my Google Drive Spreadsheets. I suggest you creating your own account on Kimono Labs, clone my API’s linked above, then connect Google Drive into Kimono Labs so you’ll have the spreadsheet at your disposal.
How To Use:
The above screenshot is what I posted on Friday and it is all the gift cards listed on Paypal Digital Gifts, and by looking at the Price column, if it is a fixed price and not a price range, you can see if the gift card is on sale or not. If it’s questionable like the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, you could click on the eBay link to confirm. Otherwise, all the cards tell you the percentage discount.
If you want to see the full dump on Friday for historical data that hasn’t been refreshed you can view it here.
This will be especially helpful on the days there are the 2x up to 5x bonus on the eBay Bucks.
Happy Deal Finding
Now that you’re empowered with finding a deal on eBay, you can find the deals yourself without waiting it to be posted by someone on a deal forum or any blogger. For me, this will be useful to find a deal without waiting for an eBay email telling me what gift card is on sale because I rarely check those “deal” emails. I will read their emails telling me what multiplier for the eBay Bucks offer.
Continue reading...