eBay automation

The problem

I'm selling hundreds of electronic and hip hop records from my DJing days. Selling one properly is a lot of work. You photograph it, work out which exact pressing you have, find what copies sell for, grade its condition, write a description a stranger would want to read, and get all of it onto eBay.

Doing that by hand for hundreds of records is tedious, and some of them won't sell. Handing all of it to an AI had its own risk: the grade decides whether a buyer opens the package and feels lied to.

What I built

I shoot a pile of records with my phone and drop every photo into one Google Drive folder. The system sorts the pile into records by reading the labels, label colors and jackets. Last time it took 63 loose photos and found nine records in them.

From there it cleans up the photos, pulls each record's details from Discogs (a big public record database), prices it against what copies have actually sold for, and links every track it can find on YouTube so a buyer can listen first. Then it stops and asks me for a short story about what the record meant to me. It builds a custom listing page and fills in eBay's fields. After I approve, it publishes and updates my inventory spreadsheet and a dashboard of bids, watchers and views.

When a record sells, it builds the packing slip, buys and prints the shipping label through eBay, and adds the tracking number so the order shows as shipped on eBay and in my spreadsheet. A check makes sure a listing never charges less for shipping than the label will cost.

The machine does the sorting, cleanup, research, pricing, page building and shipping labels. I do the parts only a person can: I play and grade every record, write the story, and give the go-ahead.

What had to be handled carefully

• Take grading away from the AI. For days the tool said it could grade records from photos. When I asked it to circle a scratch I could see, it couldn't. It was only agreeing with me. A phone photo can't show what a record sounds like, so I now play every record on a turntable and grade by ear.
• Catch photos no camera took. An image tool I asked only to crop a photo also rewrote the record label: a new year, a new catalog number, an invented barcode. A plain check for whether a camera ever took the picture caught it.
• Back the rules with code. Code underneath refuses to pass a listing that reuses a sentence from another listing, calls a record rare without proof, or has a photo no camera took. I had written those as rules first, and they got broken anyway.
• Keep the story and the go-ahead mine. The story paragraph is always mine, and I read and revise every listing before it goes live.

The value

Without this system, I wouldn't have listed a single record. Doing every step by hand for what most of these records sell for never made sense, so they sat on the shelf.

With it, I've listed 19 records and sold 6 for $182, and every buyer left positive feedback. The system does the research, photos, pricing and page building. I spend my time on the parts that need a person: playing each record, grading it and telling its story.

I've let the project sit for a while because my focus has been elsewhere. It hasn't stopped, though. Every time I do laundry, I play a record and add it to the inventory.