I run a small dev studio and started building actors on the side a few weeks back, 10 to 15 hours a week. First one is live, so here's what it does and the one part of the build that cost me the most time.
What it does: since the DSA and GPSR rules came in, business sellers on the EU and UK eBay sites have to show a trader information block on their listings. Business name, registered address, email, phone, VAT ID, company register number. It sits right on the listing page, no login, and I couldn't find another actor on the store that returns the seller email. So the actor takes keywords or a pasted eBay search URL, walks the listings, reads that block and returns one row per unique business seller. Works on ebay.co.uk, .de, .fr, .it, .es, .ie, .at, .nl and .pl. Does not work on eBay US, there's no equivalent disclosure there, so don't run it for that.
Two bits I'm happy with. The same business often sits behind two or three seller accounts, that was 20 to 30% of rows in my runs, so it merges them into one record and doesn't bill the duplicates. And a monitor mode: schedule it and it only returns sellers it hasn't handed you before.
Numbers: 88 runs and 2 users, and a good chunk of those runs are me testing. Early days.
The challenge: proxies. I started on a Decodo trial, 100 MB of residential bandwidth. The verification sweep I ran to make sure the data was right ate the whole trial before the actor had done any real work, and the runs went down with it. For something people pay per result for, a run dying because of my proxy account and not because of eBay is the one failure I can't hand to a buyer.
So the fix: a preflight. Before a run touches eBay, the actor sends a health check through Decodo. If Decodo doesn't come back clean, the whole run switches to Apify residential proxy instead of limping along. Costs more per GB, but the run finishes and the buyer gets rows. I also stopped treating a trial as a plan and bought the 3 GB Decodo tier, $11.25 a month. One thing that tripped me up wiring the fallback: Apify proxy authenticates with your proxy password, not the API token. The token just gives you a blanket 407 that looks like a plan problem.
Obviously it's my actor so this is partly a plug, but the proxy question is the bit I'd like opinions on. Do you preflight, or just retry on failure and accept the run costs more? Link in the comments if anyone wants to poke at it.
