The Scenario
You inherited a pricing project from someone who left the team six weeks ago. There's a workbook with 200 eBay product search queries in column A — someone spent time building this list, and your job is to run them all through Countdown API's collection system and bring the results back into the workbook for analysis. The handoff note says "just use the collection endpoint." That's the entire documentation.
The bad version:
- Spend forty minutes reading the Countdown API docs, figure out that "collections" means queuing batch requests via the API, and realize you need to write code or use a tool like Postman to interact with the endpoint at all
- Manually construct a collection request for the first 20 queries, run it, download the CSV result, open it, reformat the columns to match your workbook's structure, and paste it into a new worksheet — then realize you only did 20 of the 200
- Repeat the above nine more times, then spend another hour aligning the ten result worksheets into a single coherent dataset with consistent column headers
Nobody told you this was going to be a data engineering project.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads your query list, interfaces with Countdown API's collection system, and writes the results back into a new worksheet — without you touching the API docs or writing a single line of code.
Create a Countdown API collection, add one request for each product query in column A of Sheet1, start the collection, and when done write all results to a new worksheet called "Results" with columns for query, title, price, seller, and URL
What You Get
- A new "Results" worksheet created automatically with structured columns
- One row per listing result, tied to the originating query from column A
- Results written as the collection finishes — no manual download, no CSV import
- The collection ID written to cell B1 of Sheet1 for reference if you need to re-fetch
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some queries in column A are duplicates that would waste collection slots
Before creating the Countdown API collection, deduplicate the values in column A, write the unique queries to column C, and then create the collection using column C — one request per unique query
The results need to land in a specific worksheet structure with separate sheets per category
The queries in column A have a category label in column B. Create one Countdown API collection per unique category, name each results worksheet after the category, and write the corresponding results into each worksheet
The collection finished but some queries returned zero listings
Check the Results worksheet for rows where the title column is blank, write the query values for those rows to a "No Results" worksheet in column A, and flag them in column F of the Results worksheet with the text "no listings returned"
Full cleanup + batch + summary in one shot for a leadership report due this afternoon
Deduplicate column A, strip any trailing whitespace from queries, create a Countdown API collection for all unique queries, write results to a "Raw Results" worksheet, then create a "Summary" worksheet with one row per query showing the lowest and highest price found and the number of listings returned
The cleanup, the batch run, the write-back, and the summary all happen in one prompt — you don't manage the steps between them.
Try It
If you have a list of eBay queries waiting in a workbook, get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and ask it to run the whole collection in one shot. Also see: Pull eBay Search Results Into an Excel workbook for Competitive Pricing or the Countdown API overview.