How do I track my eBay purchases using Airtable with Zapier?

Hi @tantriskb 

If you get email notifications from ebay, then you can use email parsing.

Resources for email parsing:

• Email Parsing: Extract Structured Data from Emails with ChatGPT and Zapier

Hi there @tantriskb! 🙂

How did you get on with that Email Parsing guide Troy shared? Were you able to successfully extract the necessary information from the eBay order confirmation emails you receive and store it in Airtable?

Or did you find a different solution? If so, we’d love to hear more about it! 

And if you’re still stuck at all on this do let us know and we’ll be happy to assist further. Looking forward to hearing from you! 

I am afraid poorly.

We don’t actually get email from ebay for every purchase.  I am not sure why that is the case, as it does not seem to be an issue with our ebay setting or spam. Moreover, ebay emails are not consistent, depending on how you purchase the item (auction, buy it now, offer, etc), and which ebay store you purchase from (we buy internationally), so using a email system to pull this data was not implementable.

I have come up with two possible alternatives. 

1. There is a Chrome Extension that turns your purchase list into a spreadsheet, which I can then import into a database. This works, however, it’s manual and so cumbersome.
2. QuickBooks pulls ebay purchases successfully, so we might be able to work an integration with QuickBooks, but I have not played with this yet.
3. There are scraping tools that we can manually trigger to scrape the purchase list from our ebay account page - but again, very cumbersome.

Kevin

Sorry to hear the email parsing approach didn’t work out, @tantriskb.  

Great work in coming up with those potential alternatives! I have some suggestions on how you might be able to automate those further...

1. There is a Chrome Extension that turns your purchase list into a spreadsheet, which I can then import into a database. This works, however, it’s manual and so cumbersome.

Maybe you could trigger a Zap when a new spreadsheet is created, then have it add the items into the database? Though, depending on what actions are available for the database app you’re using, you might need to use Looping by Zapier to have multiple items added. See our Loop your Zap actions guide for more details.

2. QuickBooks pulls ebay purchases successfully, so we might be able to work an integration with QuickBooks, but I have not played with this yet.

I’m not seeing any eBay specific triggers available for the QuickBooks Online app but if the purchases are added as new payments for example, and have some sort of reference to indicate that it relates to an eBay purchase, then you could use a filter to ensure the Zap only continues for eBay specific purchases. 

3. There are scraping tools that we can manually trigger to scrape the purchase list from our ebay account page - but again, very cumbersome.

There are scraping tools available that integrate with Zapier that you could use in a Zap which may help to make things less cumbersome: 

• 3 ways to extract/scrape data from websites

Hope that helps. If you run into any issues or questions in setting this up do let us know! 🙂