Saving eBay auctions for reference?

[collectbaseball]

I was wondering if anyone here knows if it's possible to download ebay auctions to use as reference for the future. It's very annoying that eBay doesn't allow you to search completed listings for beyond two weeks or whatever. Recently there were a couple of things that I had seen a few of before (probably up on eBay a three or four times a year), but I wasn't sure of the size of the piece (to determine authenticity) and couldn't remember what price they had gone for in the past. I'm normally great with computers and such, but the only thing I could think of is taking a screenshot of the completed auction of rarer things that interest me; however, that wouldn't preserve searchable text, which would be ideal when amassing a small database of items of interest.

Does anyone know of a program/Firefox extension/easy way to essentially download a website (including embedded images)?

It seems like a program with some sort of script like t-206.com uses would work for this, except that it would also need to download images and descriptions.

[terjung]

To answer your question directly, no, I do not know of a way to save old ebay auctions; however, I do know of a service that records prices of individual card sales from ebay as well as the sales from most of the major auction houses. Vintagecardprices.com is heavily subscribed to and has kind of become the gold standard for pricing at least in the vintage game. The site isn't perfect, but is has a lot right with it and I would strongly recommend it. Hope this helps.

[prestigecollectibles]

You could try this.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1146

[martyogelvie]

ebay sells their historical data for a pretty penny.

Your better off using one of the services noted below that provides historical information about past ebay auctions;

cardpricer.com
vintagecardprices.com

[rdwyer]

On the Mac side, you can do the following:

File Print.
Select Save As PDF from pop up menu
Save

You can then search your entire drive using Spotlight for keyword searches within all the files.

[collectbaseball]

On the Mac side, you can do the following:

File Print.
Select Save As PDF from pop up menu
Save

You can then search your entire drive using Spotlight for keyword searches within all the files.

YES! That is perfect. Wish I'd have thought of it. Muchas gracias.

I know that vintagecardprices is a great service, but I would much rather buy a $200 card than pay for the service. Right now I'm a broke student so I can't deal in anything high end enough to warrant spending ~10-20% of my yearly card budget on something like that. Once I'm out in the real world and making the big bucks I'm sure I'll subscribe. Note to the guy who owns the site, since he's probably reading this: please keep the player checklists and images free, they're great and sometimes it's harder to find pictures of rarer type cards. ... additionally, the thing I was looking at was memorabilia, so it wouldn't be listed on a site like that anyway.

[jbbama]

If you can add it to you watch list before it ends, i think you can keep it for 60 days in your Ebay didn't win category. Maybe copy and paste the auction.......................?