ML Bot Webshop Automation

Last week I found two interesting examples of webshops based on ML Bot and mtgolibrary.com. These are interesting because the owners found a way to interact with ML Bot and expand it beyond its original features. I'll talk about jbmtgo.com (a shop to buy cards online) and mtgotickets.com (a place to sell and buy tixs). Please visit them to get an idea.

• JB Mtgo Shop (click on the image to visit it)

Jbmtgo.com is a shop selling mtgo cards. You place the order, you pay with paypal, you go online on mtgo, contact the accont of the owner and you get the cards immediately. I tried it and it's very efficient. Technically speaking, the shop parses the file "cardsNeededAndCollection.txt", originally designed for debug purposes (and not documented on the manual). The files contains a list of all cards in the collection and their prices, so the shop can populate the inventory. One could do the same by parsing the csv of the collection, a file named .csv located in the C:\ folder (where "some_strange_characters" is a random string with numbers and letters such as hd67c2msd13d02p.csv).

• Mtgotickets (click on the image to visit it)

The other shop, mtgotickets.com is even more interesting. It just sells and buys tixs but it is more automated than jbstore. To buy tickets, just click on the orange button, choose the amount of tixs you want and then pay with PayPal. Right after the payment your account will be credited. This works more or less like this: when you send a payment, PayPal sends an email to the owner of the shop. A script on his server looks for new emails every 5 seconds and when one is founds it sends an SMS. The owner will connect, possibly via mobile, and adjust the credit on the Online Control Panel, so you can take the tixs in 1-2 minutes.

Prices change with time. Yesterday the price was 1.03 usd per tixs, today it is 1.02. I asked the owner if he has some sort of automatic updater to adapt the price with the market , like mtgotraders, but he didn't answer the question.

On mtgotickets.com you can also sell tixs. There is no automation here since the payment is manually sent via "gift" payment to save the fees. If the shop would have sent regular payments instead of gift payments, this side could have been automated too: the shop would have parsed the Tradelog on the Online Control Panel and once a "deposit" is found, a PayPal payment (via the PayPal REST Api) is sent.


Do you own a service like the ones above? Do you know / use one? Please write us (staff@mtgolibrary.com) and we'll talk about it!