Marketplace

Requirements

• Latest release of Python3
• Selenium for Python
• Pyautogui
• Geckodriver (by Mozilla, found here)
• Mozilla Firefox

Instructions

1. Make sure the geckodriver.exe, login.txt, and ads directory are in the same directory as marketplace.exe.

   Documents\MarketplaceProgram\marketplace.py
   Documents\MarketplaceProgram\geckodriver.exe
   Documents\MarketplaceProgram\ads\couch\...
   Documents\MarketplaceProgram\ads\chair\...
   

2. login.txt should an email and a password on a single line, separated by a comma followed by a space

   username@email.com, password123
   

   • If you would like for multiple accounts to post the same ads simply add more login details on separate lines

   username@email.com, password123
   person@email.com, livinglife
   toronto@email.com, mapleleafs
   

3. Make sure each ad contains an Ad.txt and at least one image

   Documents\MarketplaceProgram\ads\chair\Ad.txt
   Documents\MarketplaceProgram\ads\chair\chairPicture.jpg
   

4. Make sure Ad.txt is properly formatted

   • The first line should be the item name
   • The second line should be the item price
   • Everything else should be the item description

   Climbing Shoes
   $100
   Never worn, in the packaging
   Size 42, excellent for slab problems
   If interested call or text 123-456-7890
   

5. Run marketplace.py from a power shell terminal

   • Let your computer sit by itself for around 30 seconds per ad
   • Because the program uses your mouse and keyboard, you cannot use your computer while it runs
   • You will know it is finished when it stops for longer than 10 seconds (When the last ad from the ads folder is posted)
   • Or when the terminal closes
   • You'll figure it out, its not like it does anything cool like shoot fireworks

Possible TODO's / Personal Notes

• Allow for multiple accounts, so each ad can be posted to multiple accounts
• Speed up the program from waiting 2 seconds after every action to on page load
  • Using exclusive waits or something? Waiting for the last element to load then performing our operations
  • Could also just eliminate unnecessary waits, like waiting after the page is already loaded
  • This also isn't that big of a deal if you just leave this to run overnight, but if you really want to pump out as many ads as possible then optimizing for time becomes more important
• Improve the ad input, using CSV or spreadsheet files instead of notepad
  • Alternatively could just make what goes where in the textfile more clear
  • Potentially just a single spreadsheet, and a folder full of pictures
  • That way you could just name the pictures in the spreadsheet instead of 0,1,2, etc
• Do some exception handling, so the program won't just die when something goes wrong
  • This isn't that big of a deal, not much should go wrong
  • Basically all I might need is if an ad is formatted incorrectly or doens't have a photo to refresh and move to the next one
• Hardcoded coordinates for screensize, specifically for remember password
• Issues with some of the ads
  • Changing how some of the code worked fixed these issues as far as I can tell
• It seems like a lot of these selected elements could be found just by doing link search instead of element ID, not that element ID is wrong or doesn't work
  • Actually it seems like absolute path is almost necessary for some
• So I think if I made this in a C language it would be an executable with no other requirements? Im not sure though