You don't need to be a super-skilled coder -- if you know basic PHP, and have a PHP5 installation, it's pretty easy.
All you do is build a URL with various parameters -- search term, category, etc. That URL will return you an XML file if you were to open it in a browser.
You need to open the URL with the function simplexml_load_file, which returns an XML structure.
Then you just need to iterate through the XML structure. The syntax is amazingly simple -- for example:
$xml = simplexml_load_file($url);
$num_items = $xml->TotalItems;
(That tells you how many items were returned.)
$all_results = $xml->ItemSearchURL;
(that gives you the URL to get the same search on eBay).
Here's how you iterate through the items:
foreach($xml->SearchResult->ItemArray->Item as $item) {
$item_url = $item->ViewItemURLForNaturalSearch;
$item_title = $item->Title;
$item_price = $item->ConvertedCurrentPrice;
$item_timeleft = $item->TimeLeft;
$item_bids = $item->BidCount;
$item_listing_type = $item->ListingType;
$item_ebay_id = $item-> ItemID;
$item_category = $item->PrimaryCategoryName;
}
So basically, you get a set of records back, and you can display them as you please. You can do really fancy things if you want -- for example, let's say that you are selling shoes. You can sort the results into columns on your website by size - something you can't do with any of the eBay tools.
It really opens up the possibilities.