8 ms·

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.

by whyenot 9mo ago

theamk 9mo ago
sniping bots keep people on ebay.com
jader201 9mo ago
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.
jsheard 9mo ago
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.
- pishpash 9mo ago
  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.
  - pwg 9mo ago
    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'.
- noman-land 9mo ago
  The act of bidding itself shows interest and raises the price.
  - pishpash 9mo ago
    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.
    - celeritascelery 9mo ago
      It does not. Even if you submit a snipe bid the normal eBay bidding rules apply.
  - CompuHacker 9mo ago
    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.
- dingaling 9mo ago
  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.
  - ryandrake 9mo ago
    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.
    - bena 9mo ago
      It gets into the nature of "Which grain of sand makes it a pile?" 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.
      - dmurray 9mo ago
        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?
- pwg 9mo ago
  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.
  - hansvm 9mo ago
    Not just other bidders, but the engagement/SEO part of eBay's ranking algorithm.
- nutjob2 9mo ago
  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.
  - cm2187 9mo ago
    Or rather than not winning and not completing the sale, the ghost bidder retracts the bid and re-bids just under your max.
- young_rutabaga 9mo ago
  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.
  - dyauspitr 9mo ago
    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.
- pks016 9mo ago
  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.
  - ycombinatrix 9mo ago
    Are you sure the winner didn't just have a higher max bid than yours?
    - pks016 9mo ago
      Maybe but highly unlikely. I was winning till like hh:59:30 but suddenly the winning bid was like 30 dollars more than my bid
- Fwirt 9mo ago
  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.
  - JohnFen 9mo ago
    > 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.
    - cm2187 9mo ago
      Auctions are 90% bad deals because you often end up with someone getting over excited and bidding more than the next buy me now price for the same product. But 10% of the time you get lucky, particularly if auctions end at odd time of the day. So I find it's worth throwing some bids, knowing that you should almost always lose. Ebay is best when you are not in a hurry and happy to wait for the right bargain.
pishpash 9mo ago
Scraping and buy for me bots cut out eBay. Sniping bots don't.
j45 9mo ago
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?
BeetleB 9mo ago
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.
- pishpash 9mo ago
  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.
  - iLoveOncall 9mo ago
    > 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/fees-private-sellers-activated-managed-payments?id=4822 https://www.ebay.co.uk/help/selling/fees-credits-invoices/fe...
    - jsheard 9mo ago
      They're playing stupid semantic games in order to claim there's no selling fees while still having selling fees. The fees were ostensibly shifted onto the buyer, except they're bundled into the sale price and cut from what the seller receives, so in effect nothing actually changed. 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".
      - iLoveOncall 9mo ago
        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%).
Retr0id 9mo ago
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?
- tkzed49 9mo ago
  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.
  - HotHotLava 9mo ago
    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.
    - pwg 9mo ago
      From what I've seen discussed, it seems some percentage of "sniping" is to attempt to obtain both "winning bid" and "lowest possible price" (note, not the same as "max willing to pay for the same item"). The sniper is trying to hide interest, so as not to attract other interested bidders, and therefore grab "a great deal" of a small increment above the starting bid price. 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.
      - cge 9mo ago
        > 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.
gnopgnip 9mo ago
Buy for me bots results in more returns, cancellations, item not as described and other problems ebay and sellers have to deal with
- pwg 9mo ago
  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.
imtringued 9mo ago
I personally didn't understand why people still snipe on eBay even though they already have an automated bidding system and the reason is that you don't want to fall victim to nibblers. Nibblers are people who bid a low amount that raises the price but is unlikely to win the auction. I.e. someone bids 30€ on an item that you would bid 50€ on. This raises the price to 30€ because of your automatic bids. The nibbler then bids 35€ to see if that was enough and it still wasn't, losing you 5€ from early bidding. If the nibbler thought he could get the item for 30€, you would only have to pay 30.50€ to beat him. The other reason is that you don't want to lock up your money since a long auction timer means you can't start bidding on the next auction in case you lose.

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.

by whyenot 9mo ago

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.

theamk 9mo ago

sniping bots keep people on ebay.com

jader201 9mo ago

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.

jsheard 9mo ago

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.

pishpash 9mo ago
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.
- pwg 9mo ago
  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'.
noman-land 9mo ago
The act of bidding itself shows interest and raises the price.
- pishpash 9mo ago
  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.
  - celeritascelery 9mo ago
    It does not. Even if you submit a snipe bid the normal eBay bidding rules apply.
- CompuHacker 9mo ago
  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.
dingaling 9mo ago
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.
- ryandrake 9mo ago
  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.
  - bena 9mo ago
    It gets into the nature of "Which grain of sand makes it a pile?" 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.
    - dmurray 9mo ago
      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?
pwg 9mo ago
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.
- hansvm 9mo ago
  Not just other bidders, but the engagement/SEO part of eBay's ranking algorithm.
nutjob2 9mo ago
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.
- cm2187 9mo ago
  Or rather than not winning and not completing the sale, the ghost bidder retracts the bid and re-bids just under your max.
young_rutabaga 9mo ago
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.
- dyauspitr 9mo ago
  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.
pks016 9mo ago
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.
- ycombinatrix 9mo ago
  Are you sure the winner didn't just have a higher max bid than yours?
  - pks016 9mo ago
    Maybe but highly unlikely. I was winning till like hh:59:30 but suddenly the winning bid was like 30 dollars more than my bid
Fwirt 9mo ago
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.
- JohnFen 9mo ago
  > 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.
  - cm2187 9mo ago
    Auctions are 90% bad deals because you often end up with someone getting over excited and bidding more than the next buy me now price for the same product. But 10% of the time you get lucky, particularly if auctions end at odd time of the day. So I find it's worth throwing some bids, knowing that you should almost always lose. Ebay is best when you are not in a hurry and happy to wait for the right bargain.

pishpash 9mo ago

Scraping and buy for me bots cut out eBay. Sniping bots don't.

j45 9mo ago

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?

BeetleB 9mo ago

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.

pishpash 9mo ago
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.
- iLoveOncall 9mo ago
  > 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/fees-private-sellers-activated-managed-payments?id=4822 https://www.ebay.co.uk/help/selling/fees-credits-invoices/fe...
  - jsheard 9mo ago
    They're playing stupid semantic games in order to claim there's no selling fees while still having selling fees. The fees were ostensibly shifted onto the buyer, except they're bundled into the sale price and cut from what the seller receives, so in effect nothing actually changed. 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".
    - iLoveOncall 9mo ago
      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%).

Retr0id 9mo ago

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?

tkzed49 9mo ago
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.
- HotHotLava 9mo ago
  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.
  - pwg 9mo ago
    From what I've seen discussed, it seems some percentage of "sniping" is to attempt to obtain both "winning bid" and "lowest possible price" (note, not the same as "max willing to pay for the same item"). The sniper is trying to hide interest, so as not to attract other interested bidders, and therefore grab "a great deal" of a small increment above the starting bid price. 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.
    - cge 9mo ago
      > 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.

gnopgnip 9mo ago

Buy for me bots results in more returns, cancellations, item not as described and other problems ebay and sellers have to deal with

pwg 9mo ago
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.

imtringued 9mo ago

I personally didn't understand why people still snipe on eBay even though they already have an automated bidding system and the reason is that you don't want to fall victim to nibblers. Nibblers are people who bid a low amount that raises the price but is unlikely to win the auction. I.e. someone bids 30€ on an item that you would bid 50€ on. This raises the price to 30€ because of your automatic bids. The nibbler then bids 35€ to see if that was enough and it still wasn't, losing you 5€ from early bidding. If the nibbler thought he could get the item for 30€, you would only have to pay 30.50€ to beat him. The other reason is that you don't want to lock up your money since a long auction timer means you can't start bidding on the next auction in case you lose.