This is a bit of a long shot, but I’m wondering if anyone has any tips for how to set up a program or macro of some sort to alert me on when a certain instrument gets put for sale on Reverb. Their website doesn’t really do that AFAIK and the best I can figure out is saving a search, which only sends me an email once per day with new listings. Meanwhile, I can check a certain instrument several times a day and still miss one going up for sale at a crazy price because somebody swoops in and buys it within minutes of posting.
I’m sure there are at least a few different ways to go about it but I’m not exactly a software developer, so I’m wondering if there’s a reasonably straightforward bit of software or something that could go out and check on a regular basis and send me alerts when something gets posted that meets certain criteria. Any ideas?
The watching thing (the way they let you watch a category and shows it as a feed) doesn’t even update in real time, it sucks. You have to refresh or it won’t show you new listings until they batch process. Almost useless.
You’d need something like google’s web crawler, basically a bot that just constantly refreshes the search criteria and sends an email or something when a new listing appears. The more you need it to differentiate between listings, the more complicated it would be.
If it were simple I think more people would do it.
I read that if you have things in your cart, you get notified of price drops sooner but I don’t know if thats accurate and still doesn’t solve the problem of new listings.
One potential problem is that reverb has bot protection of some sort because I’ve had it where I apparently visited the same listing one too many times within a certain preordained amount of time and occasionally reverb brings up page with a “check this box if you’re human” validation tool.
I don’t know if this is specific to Reverb or if they just use a general protection service, but it didn’t really mentally register until I was thinking about your question after the fact. I have, however, seen it a few times so just hypothetically if you had a service or a program or something, I think it would need to be able to work around that.
I don’t know if it does that on the browsing window, but it definitely happened more than once on a listing page.
There are various web alert services which will keep track of changes on web pages for you. I use Web Alert XP on my phone and I’m sure there’s lots of other options out there too.
Seeing as their customer support is dogshit and they effectively banned my account for using a work VPN (ignoring emails until I bothered their account on FB…) I would not engage in automated process on a Reverb account you’d ever plan on using again.
The API might be useful for business accounts for the purpose of selling and inventory management, but those clients probably have a personal rep / special qualities to the account to keep everything from going to shit.
Any interesting monitoring would have to be from outside their ecosystem.
I looked at the API and it is all end points for sellers to manage listings and what not. There is nothing in there for searching or anything buyer related. So I guess webcrawling it is.
this could be a cool project