Dave, help, how I would go about adding an eBay search field to my homepage, one that I could enter a search term in and get the results popped up on the eBay website?
First off, some background: How can I add a Google search box to my web site and How do I add a Technorati search box to my Web site?
Now that we’ve established the theme 🙂 let’s look at how eBay structures queries. If you actually view the source to the eBay Web page, it’s just about impossible to decipher how they do searches, actually, because of all the JavaScript they’re using. Not sure why they need the complexity, but fortunately a bit of detective work can suss out the most important values, the field names and the CGI script or program on the server that receives search queries.
Boiling their form down to its bare essence, then:
action=”http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll”>
<input type=”hidden” name=”sojs” value=”1″>
<input type=”hidden” name=”from” value=”R40″>
<input type=”text” maxlength=”300″ name=”satitle” size=”20″>
<input type=”submit” value=”Search”>
</form>
Here’s an example of it at work:
Experimentation reveals that you don’t need to send either the sojs or the from fields either, so in fact the smallest possible eBay search box looks like this:
action=”http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll”>
<input type=”text” maxlength=”300″ name=”satitle” size=”20″>
<input type=”submit” value=”Search”>
</form>
I’ll leave all the fancy cleanup and design work to you, but those few lines of code should definitely get you moving in the right direction!
Dave is there any possibility for adding an ebay search field to my wordpress site that will return results on my site page not on ebay site and after clicking on the result then only a visitor will be directed to ebay site as like google custom search.
Hi Dave
Great bit of info.
Is there any way that I can access my saved eBay searches?
Thanks
Is there a way to only searxh Buy it nows?
Great coding thanks!
Hi Dave
Can you add affiliate information to the results? Same question as Jessie.
Thank you Dave for the great information!!!
George
http://www.quickieclick.com
Thanks Dave this is great, but I was wondering if I could add my affiliate link to the search results. You can link to search results or any ebay page using this tool http://affiliates.ebay.com/ns/FlexTool.htm
So I was wondering if I could work this into the script. Thanks for any ideas.
Jesse
Got you covered, Will:
https://www.askdavetaylor.com/ebay_search_box_search_titles_descriptions.html
Dave, I got the search box into my site but I need to be able to use it to search both title and description. I have not had any luck getting that part in. I need this because I encode the description of an eBay listing with a specific number giving my customers an easy way to look at their items only. Thanks for the help
Elaine, the problem is probably because you’re cutting and pasting into the “text input” mode in your page editor. Try looking in the help system to see if there’s a “code” or “raw” or “html” view you can enable: then the code you cut and paste will be correctly included as HTML, rather than “fixed” as text.
Hello,
I tried to cut and paste a few of your suggestions like “ask dave”, the froogle, and the ebay search but some of the script shows up on the page. I copied exactly what you have listed and pasted into site designer. Do you have any suggestions? If all else fails I will paste your url. Thanks, your site is very informative!
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Cheers Dave, I’m just creating my custom start page at http://www.protopage.com and this is just the ticket for my quick search box.
Dave, you are officially a genius. Cheers mate!