Effective 1st July Trademe will enforce restrictions to prevent screen scraping. We expect no disruption to our services as a result of this change.

When OMINS and EasyLister were first created there was no way for external applications to communicate directly with Trademe (to list items, collect addresses, etc). Because of this our services were built using a method known as ‘screen-scraping’ where one application acts as a real person viewing a particular web page in order to extract specific data.

In September 2010 Trademe finally released the first edition of their API. This API offered some basic functionality but was not able to perform all the listing and post sales management tasks users of our services have come to expect. Over the last 18 months a number of our services have been transitioned to using the API.

We were contacted by Trademe a little over a month ago to advise that they were enforcing restrictions to block screen scraping effective 1st July 2012. As a result our development team have been busy transitioning the final elements of our services from their traditional screen scraping to the official Trademe API. This process has occured behind the scenes and we don’t expect our services to be disrupted or adversely effected.

I would like to thank all our OMINS and EasyLister customers for their continued support.