EBay partner network API integration?

I have another account here but could not log in.

Anyway, I am trying to Have my downloadable transaction reports from my eBay partner network account automatically downloaded in Excel format and then automatically loaded into a database to be processed.

I am wondering if anybody has any experience with this. EBay gives an example PHP script that is supposed to be able to download the report. Here it is along with the information that they include:



"eBay Partner Network members with programming experience can "script" eBay Partner Network web pages making them available directly to your applications. Although any page can be scripted, this functionality is primarily targeted eBay Partner Network reporting functionality, allowing raw report data to be imported into your own data processing applications.

Scripting EBAY PARTNER NETWORK
Any page within eBay Partner Network can optionally include your username and password allowing you to authenticate your eBay Partner Network session without going through the normal login page. The names of the fields are "user_name" and "user_password" respectively.

As such, appending "&user_name=myname&user_password=mypassword" to any eBay Partner Network URL will allow your script to have the same functionality you have within the normal web browser.

All eBay Partner Network Reports within the Reports section are available via download to tab delimited files. These files can be easily imported into database programs such as Microsoft Access, MySQL, Excel, and so on.

Examples
Here is an example of downloading a day's worth of Transaction reports using a script. The assumption here is that the user's login name is "lonelypublr15" with a password of "batpole". The download in this example will get, for all Programs, the Transaction report for November 11th, 2007 ("11/13/07").

I am not a coder, I have one that is willing to create this, but they do not have access to an eBay partner network account, and I don't know if that would help anyway.

I tried this:
"
<?php
$my_username = "my_actual_username";
$my_password = "my_actual_password";
$start_date = "10/1/08";
$end_date = "10/10/08";

$url = "https://publisher.ebaypartnernetwork.com/PublisherReportsTx?user_name= $my_username&user_password=$my_password&start_date =$start_date&end_date=$end_date";
$my_report_data = file_get_contents($url);

file_put_contents("my_transactions.tsv", $my_report_data);
?>
"

But it gave me an error, saying I did not have permission to access it.

So, I typed in this URL:
and it did let me download the report. However, it downloaded the report in text format rather than Excel format. I tried changing "Tx" to "xls" and "Xls"(and of every other variation I could think of), but I was shown that the page was not found.

I see no documentation on the eBay partner network account API that they mention.

I would send them a message but from the two messages I have sent them previously, their average response time is just over one month.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks