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I'm looking into using the findCompletedItems API request to look up historical prices on sold items. In the documentation (https://developer.ebay.com/devzone/finding/callref/findCompletedItems.html) it specifically states that you are limited to 5000 requests per day, which is fine, but it also says that you are not allowed to store the data, which makes this more difficult.

"Be aware that it is possible to use this call in such a way as to violate the terms and conditions of your API License Agreement. Ensure that you do not store the results retrieved from this call or use the results for market research purposes."

Our purposes of using this data is to draw traffic to our application, which would then in turn direct traffic to eBay using our referral links, but if we have to make this request every time a user looks at a particular item then it's not going to be plausible as we'll make way more then 5000 requests a day and even if we qualified for the elevated api request limits 1.5 million would still not cut it on top of slowing down the application considerably because we can't store any data.

So I'm just wondering what eBay technically considers "storing data". Can we cache the data for 48hrs or something along those lines?

Thanks!

Bhargav Rao
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James Parker
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because we are not product support for your favorite company. – Luuklag Jul 04 '19 at 12:22

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I don't have a definitive answer for you, but I would imagine that caching the data for a limited time would be acceptable. If you respect their API, the eBay Dev staff are very reasonable people to work with.

I suspect their prohibition of storing data is meant for longer-term API-scraping and warehousing of data meant for deep post-analysis/research/etc.

Also, know that even if you get approved for 1.5M calls per day, that doesn't apply to the findCompletedItems (fCI) call (and only applies to the other Finding API calls), and you're still limited to 5K/day on fCI.

You speak of needing to display info about specific items. Remember, you can use GetSingleItem or GetMultipleItems from the Shopping API (1.5M calls/day, if approved) to get specific item info, including ended items. No need to use precious calls to fCI to get item specific info.

helios825
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  • Thank you for your response. The reasoning behind the findCI request is accuracy. We're specifically looking for pricing information and when an item is completed we know the price that it was sold for so it's more accurate. Thanks again for your response. – James Parker Jul 05 '19 at 12:35