This ban isn't about 'fairness' or bot protection; it's about protecting the Impression Funnel.
Marketplaces like eBay are designed to monetize 'Wandering Attention'—sponsored listings, 'customers also bought', and sidebar ads.
An AI Agent represents 'Laser Focused Attention'. It executes a transaction with zero wandering. It effectively turns the marketplace into a commoditized backend database / dumb pipe.
From a Growth/Unit Economics perspective, an AI Agent is a nightmare customer. It has zero probability of impulse buying and generates zero ad revenue. They are banning them to save their business model, not their inventory.
Interesting, I’m not big on AI but I have thought often it would be nice to have an ‘agent’ that monitors ebay or other classifieds sites for items based on a natural language description.
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.
The purchasing itself can important for it to jump on a great price. Maybe it finds what you're looking for at 1a while you're sleeping for example. Also if this were a business and you were going to resell it the AI could also create the listing as soon as the item is purchased.
I can't think of a scenario in which me buying some used stuff on ebay is that serious to be honest, having the AI buy would be a huge risk as well.
> Also if this were a business and you were going to resell it the AI could also create the listing as soon as the item is purchased.
That sounds like an awful grift, but good point, people might use such a system for that.
I would expect a naive implementation would give you a "least worse" option everyday and can't judge when it is "good enough"
Afterall, that's what most people would be when asked to make decisions for others without context.
Making the agent understand your requirements would be quite a bit of work.
Yeah that's very possible, I have never built anything with LLMs and I'm not a heavy user so I'm not sure how feasible it is.
I do think I would already get value from a least worse option every day, a sort of 'digest', so I don't have remember, and to look through results myself. I think it's a best case for LLM use for me, there is no harm at all in false negatives or positives, there are no significant stakes and I think the vagueness / unpredictability of the output is an advantage, it might find something that I had not even considered (like for my example: here is a used laptop with roughly these specs, it could also be a good home home server, something like that).
I essentially do this but on a state surplus auctions site. It's just a scheduled action which searches for something, e.g. old Lego kits, once a week. Usually nothing comes up but at least once there are kits I know about it.
So scraping bots and “buy for me” bots are bad, but the incredibly annoying sniping bots are OK? That sure feels like a double standard.
I never understood why eBay set things up to enable sniping.
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 never understood why eBay set things up to enable sniping.
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.
In my experience, most purely online auctions, other than eBay, do work that way. Numerous auction houses, for example, including essentially all the major ones, have their auctions online now: when they are hybrid, that involves online live bidding where an online bid will cause the auctioneer in the room to keep the lot open for more bids; when they are "timed" or "online only", times are extended in some way on bids near the deadline. It does, in fact, work much better. There is still an advantage to bidding very late: there is no disadvantage, and it lowers bids in cases of irrational or imperfect opposing bidders. But it limits that process to something that can be done by hand.
eBay really seems to be the only auctioneer using the snipable process it uses.
An alternative to ever extending the deadline is a Dutch auction model, where a bid consists of the maximum price you are willing to pay. It's a bit like integrating the snipping bot in eBay and allowing everyone to use it on fair terms.
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.
Yes, almost all online auction sites (or even offline absentee bidding) work this way. You set your maximum price and the auction house bids for you. However, in any case, bidding early gives other bidders information on how much you're willing to bid and allows them to nibble their way up to your max. So bidding late is always advantageous, even when you're setting a max bid.
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.
This is exactly how eBay bidding works now. Sniping still works because your satisfaction with the outcome of an auction isn’t just determined by “I got the item below my price ceiling” but by _how much_ below my price ceiling I got the item.
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.
Ebay works like this too. But because sniping is still permitted, I like to bid 'uncommon' amounts, like $3.17, so if someone else tried to bid a max of $3.00 even at the last moment, the bid for the few cents more wins.
This is how the popular car auction site bringatrailer.com bidding process works for cars sold on their site too, a quirk of which is that it makes watching the end of the auctions live online kinda fun, especially given the discussions that break out in comment section on each car up for sale while folks nervously watch the current candidate for the final bid cool down.
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.
Completely agree with this. It's very odd that the eBay algorithm has a hard stop, as it directly discourages the price from rising when the bidding is hottest, and is absolutely susceptible to sniping.
AFAIK eBay does do this but I’m not sure if it’s only certain categories or it’s configurable by seller. I’ve definitely seen it happen
That's how whatnot does it as well (what eBay badly copied as eBay live)
This how Trade Me (NZ auction site) works: any bid in the last 2 minutes delays the close time to 2 minutes after the bid. That can happen repeatedly, and I've seen it go on for over 20 minutes on highly contended auctions. It works well.
There are 9 time zones in the US and depending on what your buying in the eu, jp, etc, I'm not going to be up to deal with the end of an auction, either too early too late or you know I have a real efing job and i'm doing something. Having ends of auction require you to be around means you lock out large parts of the market.
It doesn't need to!
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.
Except for sealed bid auctions. EBay doesn't do sealed bid auctions, and that's fine.
For the auction house that is
For everyone. Sellers and auction house get a good price, and buyers don't get sniped.
This is how Yahoo! Japan Auctions works. If an auction receives a bid in the last few minutes, it is automatically extended.
It works quite well!
Guessing here - but they are probably relying on game theory / auction theory. They have a built in "sniping bot" - by allowing you to type your highest price, and it will auto-bid for you until that price.
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.
> They have a built in "sniping bot" - by allowing you to type your highest price, and it will auto-bid for you until that price.
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.
Except nobody uses it that way. Auctions are rare themselves. Sellers dont like it, buyers dont like it yet ebay won't change it.
People will pay a premium to win, not everyone but enough to make it worth it.
Another eBay precursor auction side, onsale.com, had the same setup. The auction ended at X date/time or five or ten minutes (I forget which) after the last bid was made.
There is no need for that. They only need to implement a closing auction like stock markets. But eBay hasn't done anything since the 1990's except raise fees.
Nothing? Don't forget when their security team sent pigs heads to people and terrorized them:)
> But eBay hasn't done anything since the 1990's except raise fees.
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...
Except you can price higher to include that cut, and the buyer protection fee is a lower percentage than the sales one was (between 7% and 2% VS I think 11%).
> it's now 100% free to sell
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.
Makes sense. In the UK, their fees plus the encouraged (used to be mandatory as an option) Paypal payment option steals a very significant chunk of the purchase price from sellers.
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.
What's the point of sniping bots when eBay has automatic bidding? Counter-sniping is essentially built-in, if your price ceiling is higher then a snipers then you're guaranteed to win even if they bid at the last millisecond.
This was my belief for many years, but then I tried sniping (with the same prices I was putting as my maximum bid before!) and my success rate skyrocketed and the prices I was paying dropped.
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.
> For some reason, auctions with more bidders seem to attract more bidders, whereas auctions with zero bids seem to go unnoticed.
Huh. I'm a "buy it now" guy and filter out the auctions, but maybe I should start looking for zero bid auctions too.
> you often end up with someone getting over excited and bidding more than the next buy me now price for the same product.
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.
I mean, an auction is something where you "win" by agreeing to pay more than anyone else. It's always going to be a bad deal for the buyer. The key with Ebay is to actually sell stuff on there too. If you're just a consumer you'll lose out on auctions in the long run.
another group..
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.
The instant outbidding is likely automatic due to you not having reached the previous bidder's entered bid.
Snipers essentially convert the ascending-bid proxy auction used in eBay into a Vickrey second-price sealed bid auction, allowing a buyer to not reveal their preferences to other participants. In theory, with rational participants, this shouldn't have any effect on revenue. In practice, buyers do not always understand auction mechanics and delay setting the highest price they're willing to pay until they are outbid. If they're outbid 3 seconds before the deadline, they lost.
If you set the highest price you’re willing to pay it inevitably drives the price higher up then it would otherwise go. There’s something about putting in a bid and immediately seeing that the price has increased that causes the person to bid again.
Establishing the price ceiling is difficult, though. You might arbitrarily set it as $23, but be sniped at $23.30. The sniper bot only needs to bid that small increment over your arbitrary ceiling.
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.
Then just put your actual hard limit in as your bid, and sleep soundly, knowing that if someone pays $0.01 more, it's OK because you wouldn't have wanted to pay that anyway.
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.
It's not supposed to be some red line absolute max price, but rather "how much is this item worth to you?" You set that as your max bid price. If you get it at auction for less than that, you got a good deal, but if you buy it for more, you got a bad deal. If someone outbids you, then maybe it was worth it to them, but you (supposedly) would not have wanted to buy the item for that much, and would rather use your money for something else.
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.
Your max price should be the price such that you're indifferent between buying the item at that price and not buying it at all.
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.
it's because this argument of "what is $0.01 more?" can be extended forever, implying you are willing to pay an infinite amount of money for anything. since we know this is silly, we try to understand what our "real" maximum is. this is difficult to do for exactly the reasons you mention in your comment! surely $0.01 is negligible! there is a tension here.
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
The field of Economics
That's exactly what automatic bidding does - it only outbids enough to beat the competing bid (up to your max) without paying any more than is needed. https://www.ebay.com/help/buying/bidding/automatic-bidding?i... (Manual bids have bid increments as well. Although others have pointed out that advance bidding might cause others to bid more than they would if they thought no one else wants the item. )
Not everyone is in auctions for the game, some people want to actually get the item. Though I imagine there's less and less of them, as most figured out long ago that auctions are a stupid waste of time.
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?
I thought eBay doesn't allow you to cancel a bid you placed.
What were you buying?
Maybe eBay should publish the price the winning bidder actually bid.
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?
It's a second price auction. Who cares what their limit is. If it's more than the value of the item to you then they will win. Otherwise you will win.
The act of bidding itself shows interest and raises the price.
The act of viewing the item page in itself demonstrates activity and is relayed to other users; leaking information about, not necessarily intent, but awareness. If you want something, figure out the details without actually clicking on it.
Auto bid raises the price to the second highest price among auto bidders, basically running an instant second-price auction. Sniping avoids running these pre-close auctions.
It does not. Even if you submit a snipe bid the normal eBay bidding rules apply.
From what I understand, the reasoning behind the snipe method of bidding is to avoid showing to other bidders that there is interest, leading to the, supposed, outcome of more likely being the only bidder and thereby receiving the item at the sellers starting bid price (or slightly above) rather than at the "max one was willing to pay" price.
Not just other bidders, but the engagement/SEO part of eBay's ranking algorithm.
Sniping is the only way to bid for two reasons:
- 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.
Or rather than not winning and not completing the sale, the ghost bidder retracts the bid and re-bids just under your max.
I have lost most of my bids to bots. Bots will literally bit at hh:59:59. The ceiling value doesn't work unless you bid way above the asking price.
Are you sure the winner didn't just have a higher max bid than yours?
Auto bid isn't the same as sniping. Sniping hides information about demand. Auto bid can't hide information as soon as there is another bidder.
Auto bid does not hide any information even with one bidder, as ebay indicates that "1 bid" has occurred.
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'.
Buy for me bots results in more returns, cancellations, item not as described and other problems ebay and sellers have to deal with
This is most likely the reason. I could see a lot of "buy for me bot" users deciding that they really did not mean that color shirt (or some other reason) when they asked it to buy a "brand X shirt in size Y" and forgot to tell the bot what colors they would accept as options and did not realize the bot might buy an "electric purple" (or some other color they dislike) shirt because it was not constrained in color choice.
I've bought hundreds of things on ebay over the years and I've never understood the issue with "sniping".
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?
And I prefer to use sniping bots because they let me revise my bid all the way up until the auction ends. If I put a bid on something and then sleep on it and decide I don’t actually want to pay that much, I can lower my bid or cancel it. If I bid with eBay directly then I loose that flexibility. It has nothing to do with trying to outsmart people or be sneaky.
I run up the prices in less competitive auctions just for fun occasionally, especially if I think someone is getting too good a deal.
Question: what kind of fun you are referring to here?
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?
You are falling for the zero-sum fallacy and mixing categories on top of 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.
They're not zero-sum on ebay because ebay takes a percentage cut
You are not fun.
Do you usually pay for the higher price you are offering?
I mean, dick move, but that has nothing to do with sniping. You could do that at any point during the auction and it would have the same effect.
Sniping means that bidders may have decided to put in a higher ceiling in order to avoid losing at the last second.
If there was never a worry about this, they could bring out (and decide) that ceiling only after being outbid.
why would you bid the highest price you can afford in an auction? the seller agreed to auction the thing; they could have just offered it for a set price.
Do you not know how ebay works? You put in the maximum price you're willing to pay, and if you win you're paying 2nd highest bid + 1. So you don't save any money by starting with a low bid.
> But as they can't easily (i.e., without expense) A/B test their strategy
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.
they notify the bidder when they're outbid, and the incremental price increases can make it tempting for someone to adjust their idea of their max price. sniping deprives them of that opportunity.
I think AI is going to level the playing field with all these bots that have been used for things like this (including scalpers for those low supply/high demand items), and retailers will (hopefully) have no choice but to address the issue once everyone starts to use/abuse them.
I can only hope.
sniping bots keep people on ebay.com
This was my thought as well, sniping bots have been around for as long as ebay has. Perhaps though, the sniping bots don't cause as much load on ebay's infrastructure?
Scraping and buy for me bots cut out eBay. Sniping bots don't.
Can’t charge for something if you’re giving it away for free.
Data’s the only moat left. Companies like stack overflow need to build revenue streams from AI or they will cease to exist.
By banning bots and then licensing some kind of access, eBay can protect itself from merely being a listing point that no human actually visits. Tailwind and their adverts via docs model, eBay and its promoted listings model, we’re going to see businesses adapt or die on this.
Note that Stack Overflow has already ceased to exist. https://xcancel.com/marcgravell/status/1922922817143660783
example of focused leadership - a commenter already noted how wondering listings drive revenue
if it was some Bozo executive as we see at most tech companies - they would be advocating to implement the Open Agentic Commerce whatever being pushed by google while not noticing its killing their own company
How can they tell its AI buying if the agent uses the right user agent and works through a real browser?
You don't have to obey user agreements.
I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
You do if you don't want to get banned.
Speaking of which. Did anyone patent this 0-click buy method yet?
Tried selling on eBay as a regular Joe lately? Item sold for roughly $190 and I lost $45 in fees - I didn't even have a premium ad or pay for any of the boosting.
No wonder Facebook marketplace has destroyed them
The problem is with items that have a national market but not a local one. For example - there may be very few local buyers who will pay a decent price for a vintage slide rule, but many on eBay. My general strategy is to list on FBM first for the eBay price that I hope to get, and then accept offers down to 75% of the price. If I don't get any bites after about a month I switch to eBay.
This. I was selling an obscure book once. I doubt there is anyone local that would be interested in it. It was sold on eBay within a week.
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.
At least in the UK, I don't lose any of the selling price to fees, 0%. The buyer has additional buying fees on their side and postage is included in the final price.
Even if they use Paypal?
Yes sold a fair bit and never had issues with fee deductions. Think it’s mostly deducted seller side
As someone who hasn't sold on eBay in a looooong time but was thinking about it for some stuff I haven't been able to sell on Marketplace, their pages and pages of fee structuring were intimidating. What was the breakdown of that $45, if you don't mind sharing?
Sure,
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.
And, at least in the US, eBay charges their "final value fee" percentage on the order total (the sale price plus the shipping price paid by the buyer). So if the item has a 3% final value fee (the percentages differ across different categories of listings) then Ebay got $0.44 of additional fee from your $14.65 of shipping you paid to the shipping service. And there is no option to obtain a rebate on actual shipping paid, even if one purchases the shipping label from eBay themselves.
I suspect they (eBay) do this to avoid folks listing items for $1.00 with $194.00 shipping to avoid paying eBay any fees.
This is a case where it may be that people are outsourcing shitty user experiences to an AI.
I’m not a huge ebayer but I’m usually watching one or two auctions at a time. The problem is that you can’t disallow marketing notifications. So, if I want to be usefully alerted for a new item in a search, or that I’ve been outbid, or the imminent end of an auction, I’ll also be getting notifications and emails about all kinds of shit I don’t care about. $5 off coupons (that only apply to 8 items that I don’t want). “You might like this!” notifications (spoiler: I never do). Group buying times (who cares?).
So I either disable ALL notifications (and have an LLM write a script that crawls searches manually and much more appropriately notifies me on its own), or I enable notifications and get a bunch of trash spam.
As it relates to specifically to buying, we’ve known for a long time that we’re all up against some kind of bot that’s timed the exact last moment and amount to outbid us. It’s no fun.
I’ve been an eBay user since 1998 and it’s been on a very slow roll of enshittification since then.
Make your experience better for humans and maybe we’d be less inclined to outsource negative experiences to AI.
Meanwhile Google announces UCP to go in completely the opposite direction (or make marketplaces like eBay do so)
Oh so just “human review “ it
What is the use case for LLM agent shoppers? I can't imagine delegating the purchase of a used item to an AI (I'd be okay with AI identifying the best deals for me to review). This must be something for people who are doing something at scale like flipping items on Ebay or drop shipping.
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.
"Hey, ChatGPT/Grok/GeneriBot4000, please watch for a great deal on a 1982 stratocaster guitar - must be in good or better condition, $600 or less, and if you see it, go ahead and buy it without confirmation"
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 have decent tech company salary but I don't even buy $10 books without checking everything. This week I almost bought a wrong book (manually) because how similar the title is. Automating stuff with AI is interesting, but I don't want the hassle of getting surprised and handling returns, if the item can be returned at all, especially on eBay.
I genuinely wonder, would you do that, really? Sure 600$ is not the end of the world for certain countries, but neither it is a sum I'm willing to just lose on random. What if the electronic parrot buys from an obvious counterfeit vendor or obvious scammer? Or what if it buys you a stratocaster but different? Or a random 1982 guitar? What if it ignores 600$? Or what if it buys 600$ item with 300$ shipping and 500$ customs from god knows where?
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?
Yeah I guess that makes sense for some people. I'm just not in a financial position where I'd let an AI buy a $600 used guitar without me taking a look at it first.
An '82 stratocaster would normally go for around $2000, so someone offloading an estate, fat fingering a price entry, etc, could give you a chance to double your money or more. $600 would be a very low price - same for a Martin D18 in fair+ condition, no cracks, etc.
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.
> An '82 stratocaster would normally go for around $2000, so someone offloading an estate, fat fingering a price entry, etc, could give you a chance to double your money or more. $600 would be a very low price - same for a Martin D18 in fair+ condition, no cracks, etc.
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 $600 without so much as looking at their condition seems like an easy way to lose a lot of money.
But most of what you are suggesting could be automated without the LLM. The price and categorical condition (new, great, good, fair, etc.) could be evaluated for a search query without getting LLM agents involved. I'm just surprised that an LLM evaluation of the written product description is the tipping point (often those descriptions are empty or contain irrelevant information), where people would switch from reviewing their carts to allowing autonomous transactions without in-the-loop supervisory control.
Yeah literally price mistakes being picked up right away. But also seems like a good way to get scammed.
I agree, and in aggregate it becomes a serious issue for the platform. People who buy autonomously are going to argue personally when it fails in any way.
I'm not sure how they would intend to stop it with this policy anyway. It at best is going to be an arms race detecting them. What it does do is prevent upfront the ham handed excuse of "I didn't bid on this, my bot did".
I wager the scammer industry looking for active bots and exploiting them would thrive. Automate creation of fake listings using throwaway accounts using popular keywords and arbitraging price lower and lower, and until automatic buyers start bidding, remember the price and delete listing. Recreate listing with that price from a separate account selling bricks for 600$, and voila - free money.
"Hey ChatGPT, I need more glass cleaner"
*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!"
[Recycling a joke from many months ago]
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!
I don't understand why you're putting the joke here. I mean yeah they'll probably start putting ads in, but that's a whole different topic.
Sir, are you aware you are not drinking regular coffee, but Columbian decaffeinated coffee crystals?
Drop shippers who arbitrage between major and minor ecommerce platforms need to maintain their listings, re-price things, etc. They don't care if the AI gets it wrong sometimes as long as they more than make back the cost of deploying it.
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.
But that also seems like a very inefficient way to accomplish this automation task from the drop shippers side too. What do you gain from the LLM that non LLM automation couldn't do more cost effectively?
The LLMs are being used to hack around the fact that while the software mostly works for what people need any given user inevitably has a few workflows that are clunky or highly manual.
Stuff that used to have to be laboriously scripted can now be pseudo code.
More importantly, doing this will quickly get throttled on the provider side (if using chat UI) or costs will skyrocket (if using APIs).
The right way to use LLMs here is to have them write (and perhaps maintain) scraping scripts and run those.
"Hey ChatGPT I want to build my own personal cloud storage computer, buy all the hardware for me then walk me through building and configuring it. My budget is $600, try to get the best deals and make sure that all the parts are compatible. I'm fine with used parts as long as they're a good deal and are in working order."
You would really do this? You'd not even want to at least briefly review the cart before making a $600 purchase of used computer hardware?
I would. I would in particular like to review the cart in form of a table rendered in LLM interface, because all e-commerce sites have bullshit. user-hostile UI/UX and I'm tired of it.
Really, dealing with bullshit for you is by far the biggest promise of any agentic solutions today.
How do ticket scalpers make money? It's an automation war. You can run arbitrage strategies at scale if you can scrape markets with bots that understand unstructured data. Even if trades go wrong sometimes it can be profitable on average.
Does it need a known and enumerated use case to be allowed? I don't like that implication.
An AI that shops for a blind user, for one free example of the untold and unexplored uses of new technology.
Smells like an opportunity
LLM-initiated purchases probably rack up chargebacks, support calls, etc for mistakes the LLM makes. I'm not surprised they want to limit it.
I might be out of the loop, but are agents actually out there buying stuff from "unwilling" vendors at any significant scale? I thought that was still mostly limited to opt-in partnerships with retailers. Still, eBay might be anticipating the issues you mentioned and trying to get ahead of them.
Not commonly known (I work in this space), but yes.
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.
More likely, they want to be the exclusive provider of LLMs that can purchase off of eBay, or at least charge for API access.
They may have an inkling that the big LLM companies will want to pay for future/past data... I imagine either Google or OpenAI has something predictive and shopping-related in the books.
This; "certified / authorized by eBay" and then agents have to pay access to the catalogue
Right -- this seems more of a protective measure than something they will proactively enforce.
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.
...haven't bots been buying things off eBay since the 90s?
I loved early eBay but gave up on it once became clear how rife it was with bid snipers, fraudsters and stolen goods.
not the User Agreement!
Impossible to enforce, they can read browser windows and pass captchas
Probably less about direct enforcement, more about after the fact. Ebay doesn't want to deal with charge backs for hallucinate purchases
Yeah, they're hedging against "AI purchases". eBay has already been dealing with automated/bots for years.
> Ebay doesn't want to deal with charge backs for hallucinate purchases
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.
If Amazon has not defeated Perplexity yet, eBay is not going to stop anyone.
This. These kinds of "rules" are basically useless because they are not enforceable. It's exactly like having speed limits but no cops.
eBay is hyper aggressive about fingerprinting, they will catch things like it trivially. Browsers leak all sorts of information like what sockets are open on localhost, making yourself look like an actual person is very challenging to someone motivated to detect you.
LLMs don't need browser automation though. Multimodal models with vision input can operate a real computer with "real" user inputs over USB, where the computer itself returns a real, plausible browser fingerprint because it is a real browser being operated by something that behaves humanly.
But will they behave like same user in past? I would guess there is lot of difference between how bot accesses page and real user has historically accessed them. Like opening multiple tabs at one time, possibly how long going through next set takes. How they navigate and so on.
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.
> But will they behave like same user in past? I would guess there is lot of difference between how bot accesses page and real user has historically accessed them. Like opening multiple tabs at one time, possibly how long going through next set takes. How they navigate and so on.
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).
Sure, the cost of that goes way up though, especially if it has to emulate real world inputs like a mouse, type in a way that’s plausible, and browse a website in a way that’s not always the direct happy path.
> Impossible to enforce
Maybe, but a policy's or law's validity or importance are not contingent on them being enforceable.
No, but when instituting bullshit policies or trying to regulate natural/normal behavior for selfish gain, it helps you if you can enforce the policy, otherwise people will just ignore it.
No one wants AI to spend their money, checked or not. The few people who would want AI, want AI to save them money
Is my primary user agent, my web browser, still allowed? /s
Maybe if you'd actually read the agreement
> In connection with using or accessing our Services you agree to comply with this User Agreement, our policies, our terms, and all applicable laws, rules, and regulations, and you will not...
> use any robot, spider, scraper, data mining tools, data gathering and extraction tools, or other automated means (including, without limitation buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end flow that *attempts to place orders without human review*) to access our Services for any purpose, except with the prior express permission of eBay;
Hasn't eBay's traffic been 80% bots since day one? I haven't participated in an auction in forever because even 20 years ago you were guaranteed to get sniped by a bot on anything except actual garbage.
I suspect they might lose money on returns too, which are probably more likely if an AI misunderstands what the buyer wants or misjudges quality or can’t detect fake listings etc
I don’t know if there are other ways eBay could lose money on returns. But my single data point: the very first thing I sold on eBay (a manual lever espresso machine) got returned because the buyer clearly didn’t know how to use it, and claimed it was defective. And because eBay has a money back guarantee, they just reached their hands into my back account and withdrew the earnings from the sale + the shipping costs for the delivery to the buyer + the shipping fees for the return. They even kept their listing fee and the sales tax. So… I don’t think eBay stands to lose money directly from returns. Maybe they risk pissing too many sellers off with an increased rate of this horrific experience?!