Something like “I want an old mini PC to use as a home server, it should have roughly these specs and cost under this amount”, and then an LLM would run some searches every day, parse the results and send me a message if something comes up.
It’s pretty easy to get alerts for when items are available for a certain price if you know the exact item you want, but on eBay and classifieds sites, I usually just want something in a rough ballpark, and the best way to find that is come back and check every day looking through searches.
I don’t really see any value in having the AI do the purchase itself though.
Many years ago, there was an auction site called uBid. They had the sane rule: Bidding is open as long as there have been bids in the past 5 minutes.
So the end date could be January 24th, 3pm, but if someone bids at 2:58pm, the deadline is extended to 3:05pm. And it keeps going.
You know, like how auctions in the real world work.
I've seen studies on auction method that suggest the difference in the final price (between explicit end time and the more traditional extend-until-bidding-stops method) is negligible for online auctions except in a few special cases. This is a marked difference from the expectation that, like a real-world in-person auction, the extending deadline might encourage further spur-of-the-moment bidding.
Whether it makes much difference to the final price or not is immaterial though if the buyers believe that it does. This is one of the (several) reasons why eBay won out against similar competition in the early days: buyers felt they were getting a better deal by being able to snipe so favoured eBay with more of their attention and this brought more sellers to the platform (which attracted more buyers, and so on round the loop). It is telling that to deal with the extra load imposed on the system by external bots refreshing pages and putting in automated bids, instead of switching to an extending auction model they implemented what is almost a built-in sniping feature.
Auction sites have to be very careful (or just very lucky) in their messaging, to convince both sellers and buyers that they are getting a good deal - any major change to how eBay works could upset the balance that they currently have in that regard and start a flood in the other direction (the more people leave, the more other people will think about leaving) to the building toward critical mass that was how they won out in those early days.
eBay really seems to be the only auctioneer using the snipable process it uses.
For example, suppose the current price is $1 and the current winner is someone who bid $2 as their maximum bid ceiling. If I bid a $3 maximum, then I become the winner at a price of $2.
In this model, there is no need for snipping and those who honestly declare their maximum ceiling from the start are in no disadvantage compared to those who frequently update their bid, nor do they overpay.
Early bids make you commit to matching other bidders’ exploratory bids. You lose out on the (naive) dream of a “great deal”. Sniping (without paid-for bot assistance) is a costless way of not revealing your ceiling until the last moment (and it commits you to actually sticking to your ceiling because there isn’t time to rebid later).
If everyone bid rationally, this wouldn’t matter, but it’s very easy to convince yourself that you can stomach bidding just a little more than your ceiling just to win the item. This cuts two ways: last-minute bids prevent this behavior from others while also stopping it in yourself.
Not that this is perfect either, often it means you can push other people’s bids up to their max even though you have no intention of buying the item. I’ve seen it as a seller and felt bad for the buyers
I've never quite understood why people get so upset about sniping on eBay. Anybody can snipe. That's just the best play. Any time I want to bid on something on eBay, I just set my max bid on the sniping tool instead of on eBay, and then forget about it.
Much like your example, in the two minutes before the end of the auction, every new bid placed extends the auction clock by another two minutes, the winner hasn't won the auction until two minutes have passed with no further counter bids.
If the winner, instead of paying what they bid, pays what the second-highest bidder bid (and bids are secret until someone exceeds them) then the incentives change. Everyone is incented to bid what it is worth to them, safely knowing (1) they won't pay more than that, (2) they will win the auction if no one outbids them, and (3) they won't pay more than necessary to win the auction.
eBay works this way (more-or-less), so you CAN (if you choose to) simply place your bid any time that is convenient and then ignore the timing of the end of the auction and all the sniping bots.
It works quite well!
The fear of being sniped encourages you to bid your maximum value, and not just wait and see if you can sneak in a lower bid. This is what all auction sites want.
With ubid, you also had the feature of letting it bid to your highest price. Yet they still extended the auction if someone outbid your highest price.
Meanwhile it's now 100% free to sell on eBay for non-professional sellers.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/help/selling/fees-credits-invoices/fe...
Before: Buyer pays £100, seller receives £100, seller later charged £5 fee, ends up with £95.
After: Buyer pays £100, eBay pockets £5 "buyer protection fee", seller receives £95 with "no fees".
Nice:
> You won't pay final value fees or regulatory operating fees
Of course, they will likely find some other way to extract their fees.
It would be nice, however, if the final value fee went away for US non-professional sellers.
There does seem to be no indication (at least on the page you linked) of how they define "private seller", which also opens up the possibility of them defining it so narrowly that, say, only five UK residents ever qualify.
In the last 5 years I've won multiple auctions for not-really-worth-shipping things like bikes, paid via Paypal, then had the buyers contact me to say the fees are too high, cancel the auction and deal separately in cash.
For anything that you're picking up in person anyway, very little reason to use ebay vs. FB marketplace.
It seems that despite repeated reminders and explanations, there are three groups of people using eBay "incorrectly" that make the sniping strategy viable: 1) People who do not understand proxy bidding and think that they "need" to repeatedly bid in increments. 2) People who are irrational about their price ceiling and are willing to bid above their price ceiling because they want to "win". 3) People who want to drive up the price either to deprive others of a good deal, or to drive up the price on behalf of the seller by starting a bidding war with the two above groups.
From a sellers perspective it is common to deal with buyers who won't pay because they paid "more than they wanted", although this is against the eBay ToS and a bid is a contract to purchase the item, because there are few consequences for not doing so.
For some reason, auctions with more bidders seem to attract more bidders, whereas auctions with zero bids seem to go unnoticed. I wonder if this has to do with eBay's search ranking algorithm or some other irrational behavior that I don't understand. At any rate, bidding with 5 or less seconds left to go seems to defeat the above behaviors. I find it distasteful and irrational but it works so I put up with it.
eBay's reputation and trust network is really what makes it a viable product at this point. Given how unreliable Facebook Marketplace buyers are and how many scams are present, I would hesitate to conduct any major transactions beyond a local area.
Huh. I'm a "buy it now" guy and filter out the auctions, but maybe I should start looking for zero bid auctions too.
I don't find auctions exciting or compelling, so I doubt I'd get overly excited about bidding. I'd just set a max bid (probably about half what I would expect to pay with "buy it now", to compensate for the extra delays and hassle involved with auctions) and call it good. If I'm outbid, I'd just do the straight purchase like I would have anyway.
The reason that unnoticed auctions might be worth me looking at is to expand the pool of possible sellers to buy from. Although if my bid makes the auction suddenly attract the attention of automated bidders/snipers, then there's no point to it for me. This might be a nonstarter.
I'll probably give it a try and see how it goes, though.
That's not true. Sometimes there's not a lot of demand and you pay much less than average market price.
If something is priced super low then someone might step in to arbitrage, but even with perfect knowledge in a perfectly efficient market, an arbitrager will only be willing to pay the true value minus the cost of relisting, the cost of reshipping, the cost of their time, the cost of tying up their money, and the cost of the risk it won't resell. If you beat that by fifty cents you'll get a great deal on the item.
This either limits the number of bidders though worse discoverability or just less desirability and lower prices.
i am looking for a bargain not a bidding war. i dont know what is my price ceiling but i know i will only increment twice. if someone outbids me instantly twice in a row i dont want the thing anymore.
Can you really say that $23 was your hard limit, or would you have paid $23.40? Unless you're buying something also available at retail, nobody can be that accurate in foresight.
Sniping removes the 'contemplation window' to reconsider your bid.
I've never really been bothered by "sniping" in eBay. I always bid my absolute 100% maximum, and if someone bids more than me, then they can have it.
Like, if I'm at a store and an item costs $500, and I bring it to the checkout and the cashier says "oh sorry that was mislabeled, it's $500.01 not $500", there is no world in which I go "okay never mind then, $500 was my max". There does not exist a situation where I've decided I want something at price $X, but would not buy it at price $X + $0.01, because $0.01 is absolutely negligible.
So where does this fantasy of an absolute max price come from?
At a shop, usually you're paying less than the maximum you'd be willing to pay, because the shop's prices are fixed and it would be a big coincidence if the price they set happened to match your max price exactly.[1] So even if we model you as homo economicus, it's normal that you're almost always fine with paying $X + $0.01.
In the case where $X really is your max price (i.e. it's right at your threshold of indifference), the idea of rejecting $X + $0.01 seems less silly. You were already very close to deciding $X was too much, so you're probably feeling ambivalent about making the purchase, and the trivial nudge of an extra cent being added to the price might as well be what pushes you over the edge.
[1] There are exceptions, e.g. when you have a negligible preference between brands A and B, so you're defaulting to brand A because the prices are exactly the same, but you would buy B if it were marginally cheaper. But that doesn't affect the main point here.
(And it has to be theoretically false, otherwise $X is equivalent to $X + $0.01 for all X, and so if you'd buy something at 1c you'd buy it for the contents of your bank account.)
For tricky-to-price items like unique art pieces, the idea that you can pin this down might be a fantasy, but for commodity items it's pretty reasonable. If you can buy the same thing at costco dot com for $500, then it's probably not worth more than $500 to you, and if at auction you get outbid and it sells for $500.01 then you'll shrug and go order the same thing for a cent less, having wasted only a few minutes of your time. If the item you're bidding on is discontinued (e.g. it's last year's model) but you can buy a slightly better one for $550, and you can spare that extra $50, then again you won't be too sad about getting outbid. Online auctions are more popular for used items, but again in that case you usually still have an idea of what a used item is worth to you.
and so, absolute max price is not a fantasy - the world would be absurd if it were - but instead its a real and difficult to construct value
In fact, I'm somewhat angry at sellers setting up auctions if there's no other way to acquire a specific item. Why they won't put a minimum price they're happy to part with some items for, instead of wasting time of a lot of people by withholding target price and pretending they're earning premium through work?
Also some sellers seem to use some fake accounts to bid high on their own item, revealing your max bid, then cancel their bid, then bid right under your max bid to maximise their sell price. Happened to me twice, and now no longer setting my max bid in advance since.
Knowing people bid snipe by bidding one cent over whole dollars, would you consistently bid two cents over if it meant you would win more of your auctions?
One cent is negligible. If you asked me if I would have paid $10.01 instead of $10.00, I'd probably say "Sure". $10.02? $10.03? Like, where does the line get drawn?
And then you come at it from the other way. Let's say I'd pay $10, but not $11. But what about $10.50? $10.25? Or we can go down by pennies again.
I agree, put in your limit and walk away. If you get overbid, even by a cent, don't sweat it. That's the game. But I can see why people get frustrated when they lose an auction by one cent.
This would let people stop thinking "I lost by one cent" in that situation. It also has a marketing benefit: look at all these people who got great bargains relative to what they would have paid. And it's not an unreasonable amount of transparency: in second price auctions e.g. for stamps or electricity, it's normal to publish the details of all the bids.
Of course eBay has already thought about this more deeply than me and perhaps trialled it and decided they didn't like it. Maybe it's off-putting to sellers to see they lost something for $10 to a buyer who would have paid $30?
The 'nibblers' will invariably show up and bid small amounts until they exceed your maximum bid, while not revealing theirs.
A bidding war can make the perceived value of an item increase.
- bidding more than once and allowing time for others to counter bid drives up the price through competition for the item. Sniping also removes the temptation to counter bid, rather than to stick to your maximum bid.
- not sniping allows the seller to do ghost bidding, letting them discover your maximum price (including counter bidding). Here someone always out bid you (the ghost bidder) but the seller says the winner didn't complete the sale so offers it to you at your highest bid.
The only way auto-bid could hide information is if eBay treated auto bid as "silent auction" style. Show "zero bids" all the way to the end, then once closed, see which 'auto-bid' came in highest and declare that bidder the winner.
Sniping is attempting to recreate 'silent auction' style bidding, with a bid system that is not 'silent'.
Sure, I've been outbid at the last moment. Losing an auction is always a little frustrating. But if I was willing to pay that price I should have bid it myself. Feels fair enough?
Since, from the outside, it surely sounds like you get pleasure by inflicting some form of suffering on others. But that hopefully isn’t considered fun, is it?
Globally, wealth gets created, which leads to a positive-sum game, not a zero sum game.
On the other hand, if one quadrillionaire in a city owns all the money available in that said system except 100 currency units, the remaining 100 humans are in possession of exactly 1 currency unit. The suffering for the 100 humans is significantly higher for the 100 than for the one, even though it fulfils your premise of a balanced global suffering index.
Before the trade, the value for the seller and the buyer was zero. Whatever the trade involved, the moment the minimum of the seller gets hit, it becomes a positive-sum game.
If this would not be the case long-term rise of stocks would be impossible. That would mean a stock rise is a redistribution and you take it away from someone else . So, if the stock market were truly zero-sum, every currency unit earned would require someone else to have lost one.
If there was never a worry about this, they could bring out (and decide) that ceiling only after being outbid.
And this probably appears to work enough times in the snipers favor to trick them into thinking it is a winning strategy, whereas they likely would have won the same auctions in the end by just bidding that 'minimum' as their maximum bid. But as they can't easily (i.e., without expense) A/B test their strategy, they get no feedback that sniping isn't really helping them like they think it is helping them.
There also isn't really any detriment. At worst, the sniper is making the same bid they would have made otherwise. If the opposing bidders are not purely rational, and have not put in their actual maximum bid, then sniping can deprive them of that opportunity and thus lowers the hammer price.
And bidders are not purely rational, especially when the items are not purely utilitarian. Getting notifications that you have been outbid has an emotional effect, as does having time to think about raising the bid.
I can only hope.
No wonder Facebook marketplace has destroyed them
Same for a half functioning Xbox. No "normal" person would want that. But apparently, on eBay, something like a dozen people took serious interest in it, and it was sold in a few days in "parts only" condition. For sure I didn't like how much the transaction fee I paid, but at least I got rid of it for a decent amount of money.
I listed the item as $185.00 + $10.00 shipping.
Order total = $195.00
- Transaction fees = $32.44
- Postage label = $14.65
Postage I can understand.
I suspect they (eBay) do this to avoid folks listing items for $1.00 with $194.00 shipping to avoid paying eBay any fees.
I imagine this type of automation existed before LLM agents came along - what do they add? Is it just the ability to evaluate the product description? Item quality is already listed as a categorical variable.
Ongoing tasks, arbitrage for mispriced postings in ways that aren't currently exploited that LLMs make feasible - by banning auto-buy, maybe they're attempting to delineate between human seeming behavior and automation, and giving AI permission to buy looks too much like a real person?
Seems pretty petty to me.
I've seen enough by now and I know that some people will just unleash LLMs on anything without almost no oversight. We can already see people use agentic IDEs with "do all the shit" flag, they would probably easily add finances to the list of automation.
But, honestly, would you?
If I were going to automate something like this, I'd have a suite of products to watch for - common enough to be reasonably frequent but obscure enough to be mispriced, kinda the whole idea behind secondhand ocmmission / antique / estate sale shops.
I don't know how EBay is supposed to differentiate automation from real users in this scenario. To get around it, all you need is human intervention at the last act, so you could fire up your bot and have it forward the "buy now" link when all parameters are met? Maybe they just don't want AI companies to have an argument for some sort of revenue sharing or commissions.
On the other hand, when people list a steeply discounted item, there's usually a good reason why they do so - opportunities for easy arbitrage are rare because people would usually prefer not to give you free money if they can help it. Signing up to automatically buy broken items for $600 without so much as looking at their condition seems like an easy way to lose a lot of money.
I'm not sure how they would intend to stop it with this policy anyway. It at best is going to be an arms race detecting them. What it does do is prevent upfront the ham handed excuse of "I didn't bid on this, my bot did".
*OpenAI issues a micro auction to glass cleaner companies and distributors to see who will bid the highest combined commision*
"Sure thing! I ordered some Glass Clean Plus from Target for you!"
My mistake, you're completely correct, perhaps even more-correct than the wonderful flavor of Mococoa drink, with all-natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners!
So now imagine ten thousand of these jerks telling their AI of choice "hey go scrape everything you can and re-list it for 10% more". That's a lot of load on the platforms at both ends for listings that are unlikely to generate many sales.
The right way to use LLMs here is to have them write (and perhaps maintain) scraping scripts and run those.
Really, dealing with bullshit for you is by far the biggest promise of any agentic solutions today.
An AI that shops for a blind user, for one free example of the untold and unexplored uses of new technology.
Agents are being used to automate things like non-cash account balance arbitrage, stacking and abusing marketing promotions, triangulated purchasing schemes, and purchase-refund arbitrage schemes at an increasingly large scale.
If you have a well-behaved agent that uses a browser to buy on eBay, I doubt that will cause issues. But if it leads to issues, they can point to that clause instead of having to help repair the issues caused by someone else's software.
Impossible to enforce, they can read browser windows and pass captchas
A charge back doesn’t mean buyer always wins. Imagine if credit card companies also pass a rule - “LLM or AI purchases are non-refundable”.
On a different note - once I tried to cancel an eBay order within a minute, both eBay and seller declined. It’s so fked up with them.
There might be lot of modelling that could be done simply based on words used in searches and behaviour of opening pages. All trivially tracked to user's logged in session.
That would be making an assumption that a device and/or account maps 1:1 to a specific human. It does not. People share accounts, share devices, and ask others for one-off help ("hey can you finish buying this for me while I deal with $[whatever our kid just did]", this kind of stuff).
Maybe, but a policy's or law's validity or importance are not contingent on them being enforceable.