Figure 1. "Buyer waiting" message on the product detail page

You could visit the product detail page for every item you own and see if any are in immediate demand, but if you own more than five or six books or CDs, that's going to be a time-consuming process. Instead, you can kick-start the process by visiting the Sell Your Collection page. To get there, go to the Your Store page (http://www.amazon.com/yourstore/) and click "Sell Your Collection" under the "More to Explore" heading on the lefthand side of the page.

The Sell Your Collection page lists all of the items you've purchased through Amazon and any items you've told Amazon that you own . As you go through the list you'll see yellow "Sell Yours Here" buttons that begin the process of listing the item for sale . What you're really looking for, though, are those items that show a "buyer waiting" message under those buttons. By paging through your collection and scanning the list, you can compile a list of the items that will probably sell quickly.

To run this code you'll need a Google developer's key. A key is free and easy to obtain at http://www.google.com/apis/. This code accepts the location of a text file on the command line. It should contain a list of the ASINs you want to query Google for. Add the following code to a file called buyer_waiting.pl.

#!/usr/bin/perl
# buyer_waiting.pl
# A script to check Google/Amazon for waiting buyers.
# Usage: perl buyer_waiting.pl <asin file>

#Your Google API developer's key
my $google_key='insert Google developer key';

#Location of the GoogleSearch WSDL file
my $google_wdsl = "http://api.google.com/GoogleSearch.wsdl";

#Your Amazon Developer's token
my $dev_token = 'insert Amazon developer token';

#Your Aassociates Tag
my $af_code = 'insert associates tag';

use strict;

#Set the necessary Perl modules
use SOAP::Lite;
use XML::Simple;
use LWP::Simple;

#Take the query from the command-line
my $asinfile = shift @ARGV or die "Usage:perl buyer_waiting.pl [RETURN]
<asin file>\n";

#Create a new SOAP::Lite instance,feeding it GoogleSearch.wsdl
my $google_search = SOAP::Lite->service($google_wdsl);

#Set a counter for the results
my $i = 0;

#Loop through the ASINs, performing a query for each
open(ASINFILE, "<".$asinfile);
while(<ASINFILE>) {
    my($asin) = $_;
    chomp($asin);
   
    #Build Google Query
    my $query = $asin . " \"buyer waiting!\" site:www.amazon.com";
    
    #Send Query Google Request
    my $results = $google_search ->doGoogleSearch($google_key,[RETURN]
 $query,0,10,"false","","false","","latin1","latin1");
    
    #Loop through any results
    foreach my $result (@{$results->{resultElements}}){
        $i++;
            
        #Get Title from Amazon
        my $url = "http://xml.amazon.com/onca/xml3?t=" . $af_code . 
                  "&dev-t=" . $dev_token .
                  "&type=lite&f=xml&" .
                  "AsinSearch=" . $asin;
        my $content = get($url);
        die "Could not retrieve info for $asin" unless $content;
        my $xmlsimple = XML::Simple->new(  );
        my $response = $xmlsimple->XMLin($content);
        my $title = $response->{Details}->{ProductName};
    
        #Print out the tile
        print "A buyer is waiting for " . $title .
        " [" . $asin . "]\n";
    }
}
if ($i == 0) {print "No buyers waiting for these items.\n"};