[HN Gopher] eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user ...
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eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement
update
Author : bdcravens
Score : 301 points
Date : 2026-01-21 21:07 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.valueaddedresource.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.valueaddedresource.net)
| advisedwang wrote:
| LLM-initiated purchases probably rack up chargebacks, support
| calls, etc for mistakes the LLM makes. I'm not surprised they
| want to limit it.
| doctoboggan wrote:
| More likely, they want to be the exclusive provider of LLMs
| that can purchase off of eBay, or at least charge for API
| access.
| rvnx wrote:
| This; "certified / authorized by eBay" and then agents have
| to pay access to the catalogue
| nxobject wrote:
| 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.
| lukev wrote:
| 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.
| jsheard wrote:
| 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.
| Nkharrl wrote:
| 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.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| They should treat it like freight forwarders. They're allowed,
| but when you use one you don't get the return policy.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| not the User Agreement!
|
| Impossible to enforce, they can read browser windows and pass
| captchas
| wobblyasp wrote:
| Probably less about direct enforcement, more about after the
| fact. Ebay doesn't want to deal with charge backs for
| hallucinate purchases
| petcat wrote:
| Yeah, they're hedging against "AI purchases". eBay has
| already been dealing with automated/bots for years.
| mandeepj wrote:
| > 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.
| drum55 wrote:
| 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.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| 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.
| drum55 wrote:
| 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.
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _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).
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| > Impossible to enforce
|
| Maybe, but a policy's or law's validity or importance are not
| contingent on them being enforceable.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| drnick1 wrote:
| This. These kinds of "rules" are basically useless because they
| are not enforceable. It's exactly like having speed limits but
| no cops.
| g947o wrote:
| If Amazon has not defeated Perplexity yet, eBay is not going to
| stop anyone.
| whyenot wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| sniping bots keep people on ebay.com
| jader201 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| noman-land wrote:
| The act of bidding itself shows interest and raises the
| price.
| pishpash wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It does not. Even if you submit a snipe bid the normal
| eBay bidding rules apply.
| CompuHacker wrote:
| 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.
| pishpash wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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'.
| dingaling wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| bena wrote:
| The only way to win by a cent is to put your bid at that.
|
| If the current price is $5 and your max bid is $30 and I
| put a max bid of $100, it will make the current price $31
| - $35, whatever the increment is.
|
| To get ebay to accept a bid of one cent over, you have to
| explicitly set that. Let's say, I'd actually pay $30 as
| well. $30.01 isn't materially different. So if I put in
| $30.01, my bid becomes higher than yours.
| nutjob2 wrote:
| If you enter your maximum bid in ebay you're revealing
| it. With sniping no one can discover your maximum bid.
|
| The 'nibblers' will invariably show up and bid small
| amounts until they exceed your maximum bid, while not
| revealing theirs.
| jsmith99 wrote:
| 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Exactly. I could put $100,000 as my max bid, but if
| second place only bids $10, then all they know is I bid
| $11 (or whatever the increment is). eBay doesn't tell
| anyone my max is $100K.
| krackers wrote:
| I think the reasoning is that people are irrational, and
| people don't actually have "hard limits' so others will
| bid in increments to exceed it. So in aggregate you will
| end up hitting your max more often because of others'
| irrationality than if it was a sealed auction and you
| don't give them that chance.
| vidarh wrote:
| People also will often have a "hard at the time" limit
| that turns out to be very soft when they realise _other
| people also wants the same thing_.
|
| A bidding war can make the perceived value of an item
| increase.
| nutjob2 wrote:
| This is my point. If you look at the actual behavior and
| read people's comments in forums you'll see that almost
| no one sticks to their "hard limit". Including me!
|
| People's competitive behavior, or "you're not taking this
| from me," or "I've definitely got this item and have made
| plans" or any number of other emotional behaviors take
| over.
|
| People's railing against sniping also demonstrates this.
| hattmall wrote:
| But I want to get the item as cheaply as possible, not
| pay as close to my maximum without going over.
| no-name-here wrote:
| 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. )
| throwaway_20357 wrote:
| Yes, what I think happens is the following: User A's
| price ceiling is $10, User B's $12. When both reveal
| their max price early, the item will go to $10.50 ($0.50
| increment over A's max price). User A then has plenty of
| time to notice the item being valued at $10.50 by
| someone. In many cases users then adjust the value they
| assign to the item and increase their bid. The result:
| User B has to pay more than $10.50 they would have paid
| when sniping the item seconds before auction expiration.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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?
| cm2187 wrote:
| But if that someone isn't rational it is better to not
| give him the time to react to your highest bid.
|
| 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.
| neilfrndes wrote:
| I thought eBay doesn't allow you to cancel a bid you
| placed.
| cm2187 wrote:
| It does. You can argue you bid a wrong amount by mistake.
| It's necessary because mistakes do happen, and it even
| happened to me to retract a mistake once (was bidding on
| two items simultaneously in two tabs and mixed them up).
| But it gets abused.
| ycombinatrix wrote:
| What were you buying?
| cm2187 wrote:
| Mostly electronics, SSDs, motherboards, etc.
| mort96 wrote:
| I don't understand this line of reasoning. I don't do
| auctions, but if I did, it would be because I want that
| item. When I want something, I never have an absolute
| hard price ceiling; if I'm willing to pay $10000, I'm
| willing to pay $10000.01. I can't imagine _anyone_ who
| would be happy to pay $X for an item but not $X + $0.01.
|
| 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?
| direwolf20 wrote:
| The field of Economics
| thornewolf wrote:
| 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
| mort96 wrote:
| It can be extended forever in theory, and sure, that is
| an interesting philosophical discussion, but it isn't in
| practice. We're discussing sniping. That means you make
| the choice _once_ : do I send in a last-second bid that's
| $.01 more than my "max price", or do I not?
| imtringued wrote:
| You're just trolling at this point.
|
| Imagine someone wanting to pay $3.50 on an auction and
| them rounding up to $4 to account for cent sniping.
| You're saying they should bid $4.01, but the bid is
| already including half a hundred one cent increments
| beyond the price to avoid cent sniping.
|
| You're saying it's only one cent out of 50 cents. Then
| you're saying it's only one cent out of 51 cents so you
| should keep bidding more.
|
| The infinite budget of one cent increments that you're
| dreaming of is actually finite and probably easier to
| quantify than the absolute price itself, so you're taking
| a problem where the hard part has been solved and are now
| obsessed with the easy part that almost nobody bothers
| paying attention to.
|
| Edit:
|
| Maybe the context isn't obvious but eBay has an automated
| bidding system with coarse grained increments for
| automatic bidding like 25 cents. This means there is a
| finite number of increments that can be meaningfully cent
| sniped before getting into the next coarse grain
| increment. You can't actually win an auction by placing a
| one cent higher bid at the last minute in an unfair way.
| Sniping on eBay isn't about winning the item, it's about
| doing a sealed bid auction where others can't see your
| price to nibble it up since the automated bidding systems
| performs a snipe for you at the last nanosecond if you
| entered a higher bid. There is no meaningful situation
| where a cent or two is standing between you and the item.
| elzbardico wrote:
| If your time has no value for you, sure, keep glued to
| your machine sending countless counterbids $0.01 higher
| than the latest bid.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
| less_less wrote:
| 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.
| mort96 wrote:
| The logic of "you shouldn't ever need to snipe, just bid
| your max price" _only_ works if we assume that the max
| price is a red line though. If I "value something" at
| $5000 (as in I want to buy it at $5000), and I bid $5000,
| and someone bids $5000.01, I would probably be happy if I
| sniped them and got the item for $5000.02.
| less_less wrote:
| I'm not defending "you shouldn't ever need to snipe, just
| bid your max price" as a hard principle, just trying to
| explain where the idea comes from. Sniping can be
| strategic for lots of reasons: you don't have to commit
| to a bid until the last second (in case you find a
| similar item for cheaper elsewhere), you deny other
| people information, you might avoid anxiety from
| wondering whether your bid will win, etc.
|
| That said, the max price is supposed to be a price where
| you are not especially _happy_ to get the item at that
| price, but not really sad either, a price where you would
| say "well, I hoped for better but I guess that's a fair
| deal". That's not realistically pinned down to the cent.
| But if you set a max price at $5000 and would be happy to
| get the item at $5000.02 (for some reason other than
| satisfaction from sniping), then you set your max price
| wrong, or at least differently from how economists expect
| you to set it.
| mort96 wrote:
| > But if you set a max price at $5000 and would be happy
| to get the item at $5000.02 (for some reason other than
| satisfaction from sniping), then you set your max price
| wrong, or at least differently from how economists expect
| you to set it.
|
| I think this is the problem. When most sciences observe
| reality diverge from the model, they see that as a flaw
| in the model. When economists (at least you HN
| "economists") observe reality diverge from the model,
| they seem to see that as a flaw in reality.
|
| The model is wrong.
| imtringued wrote:
| According to you, a bidder should always be willing to
| extend the bid to infinity since each increment is only
| one cent more.
| mort96 wrote:
| No, I am willing to pay $0.01 more but not infinity more,
| there's a difference
| chrisoverzero wrote:
| "I made my max bid $500.00, but I'd have paid $500.01!"
|
| "I made my max bid $500.01, but I'd have paid $500.02!"
|
| "I made my max bid $500.02, but I'd have paid $500.03!"
|
| ...where does this process end?
| pessimizer wrote:
| The way you've put it, always exactly 1C/ above your max
| bid.
| mort96 wrote:
| I can't give you a precise number, but it's somewhere
| above $0 and below $[?]
| less_less wrote:
| This thread is pretty weird.
|
| My phrase "how economists expect you to set it" is
| probably wrong here, since I'm not an economist, I've
| just read the most basic theory about how to use this
| tool, and also used it myself (on eBay, you know, years
| ago when the site was mostly auctions). So I don't really
| know what "economists expect", but rather the basic
| guidelines for using this tool. You got me there.
|
| > I think this is the problem. When most sciences observe
| reality diverge from the model, they see that as a flaw
| in the model. When economists (at least you HN
| "economists") observe reality diverge from the model,
| they seem to see that as a flaw in reality.
|
| But like, to double-check here: "reality" means your
| _imagined_ use of a tool _that you do not in fact use_ ,
| right? Like you say you "don't do auctions" and I'm
| trying to explain what that option is for, and you're
| countering that the basic "how to use this tool"
| explanation is a wrong model of reality?
| imtringued wrote:
| By your logic, there is no such thing as a limit or
| maximum bid. It's like you don't understand the concept
| of a maximum.
|
| If you're always willing to add one more cent then that
| wasn't your maximum.
| retsibsi wrote:
| 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.
| mort96 wrote:
| I don't see why I would buy something if I'm indifferent
| to whether I buy the thing.
| retsibsi wrote:
| So it should be the highest price such that you're _not_
| indifferent, you marginally prefer to buy it. The point
| is that you 're right at the threshold where it's just
| barely worth it to you.
| mort96 wrote:
| The gap between total indifference and wanting something
| bad enough to bid on it is always going to be more than
| $.01.
| retsibsi wrote:
| I reckon that's empirically false. Shops set prices like
| $499.99 for a reason.
|
| (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.)
|
| If you still dispute this, you need to try to explain how
| a larger price difference _can_ affect your decision. If
| you 'd happily place a $1 bid, and you'd definitely not
| place a $100 bid, and a 1c difference could never deter
| you from placing a bid, then... well, how is that
| possible?
| mort96 wrote:
| Regarding the last part: it's simple, $1.01 is less than
| $100
|
| This process doesn't work endlessly. You can't just add
| $.01 a billion times and I'd still pay it. But it works
| once or twice.
|
| Shops set prices like $499.99 due to funny psychological
| effects: $499.99 is still a price "in the 400s" while
| $500 is "in the 500s". Nobody sits down and thinks
| logically about it and concludes that no, the $.01
| difference between $499.99 and $500.00 crosses the line.
| But people see $499.99 and the brain initially goes "oh,
| it's only 400-something".
| retsibsi wrote:
| Are you:
|
| - agreeing there must be some threshold such that if the
| price is $X then you will buy(/bid on) the item, but if
| the price is $X + $0.01 then you won't;
|
| - but maintaining that in a case where you have already
| decided to buy/bid and the price then rises by $0.01, you
| will always go ahead and pay the extra cent (provided
| this hasn't already happened a bunch of times)?
|
| If so, then I don't see the original problem. Do your
| best to estimate X (or, more specifically, the value of X
| you actually endorse as your 'true' valuation), and put
| that in as your maximum bid. If you get the item at $X
| you'll be marginally pleased; if you get it for less then
| you'll be more pleased; and if you miss out on it then
| you shouldn't mind, as you knew it was only going to be
| just barely worth it at $X.
|
| If you're actually disagreeing with the first point, then
| you still need to explain how that can make sense. It's
| coherent to say that in practice, after making the
| decision to buy at a given price, you would always accept
| a 1c price rise but at some point between the first 1c
| rise and the billionth you'd tell the guy to piss off.
| But that's not the same as saying the actual value of the
| item, separate from the emotions involved in the purchase
| process, is somehow indeterminate. If it's not worth it
| at $1, and it's worth it at $100, but 1c can never take
| it from "worth it" to "not worth it", then ?
| mort96 wrote:
| > are you
|
| > - agreeing there must be some threshold such that if
| the price is $X then you will buy(/bid on) the item, but
| if the price is $X + $0.01 then you won't;
|
| No, I'm not. If I will buy an item for price $X, I will
| buy the item for the price $X + $.01. The decision to
| purchase something is more complex and cannot be
| encapsulated as one single dollar value.
|
| I think something your model fails to account for is:
| there is friction associated with a purchase. I will not
| necessarily go through the process of buying something
| whose "value" is $0.1 even if its price is $0.09, because
| there is friction to making a purchase which that $0.01
| profit doesn't cover.
|
| As an example: I recently played a Pokemon ROM hack where
| there was an NPC selling a nugget for 4999. You can sell
| the nugget for 5000. That's 1 coin profit; objectively a
| good trade, right? But going through the process of
| purchasing something isn't free. So in spite of what your
| economic models may suggest, I did _not_ stop everything
| I was doing and spend the rest of the game buying nuggets
| for 4999 and selling them for 5000, because that would
| 've been boring and my time has value.
|
| If I've already gone through a lot of the process to
| decide to buy something at a certain price (which
| includes doing research to find out that the thing suits
| my needs, researching how the market looks for that
| category of thing, then bringing the item to the cashier
| or engaging in the eBay auction or contacting a seller),
| then I've already spent some not-insignificant amount of
| resources on the purchasing process. A $0.01 price
| increase will _never_ be enough to stop me from
| completing that purchase, because $0.01 is not worth
| going through the whole process again.
|
| If I'm already at the point where I want to bid on an
| item at $X, then I have spent more than $0.01 in effort
| researching things to bid on, so I would also bid $X +
| $0.01.
| retsibsi wrote:
| > If I've already gone through a lot of the process to
| decide to buy something at a certain price [...] then
| I've already spent some not-insignificant amount of
| resources on the purchasing process.
|
| Yes, that's part of what I was trying to account for with
| my second bullet point. But _before_ you 've made that
| initial decision, there must be some price that would
| cause you to make it a 'yes' and some marginally higher
| price that would cause you to make it a 'no'.
|
| This value obviously won't be totally constant across
| time -- it will vary with your mental state. But at any
| given time (and for any given roll of the mental dice, if
| we're assuming there's some true indeterminism here), it
| must exist. So when we're translating from "what's the
| maximum I _would_ pay " to "what _should_ I bid ", we can
| imagine that we're in our most rational and clear-
| thinking frame of mind, aren't seized by any strange
| impulses, and so on.
|
| The time and effort of researching a different item also
| has a value that could be pinned down in a similar way.
| So it doesn't fundamentally change the arguments here; if
| product A would be worth $X in a vacuum, but you'd
| happily pay $Y to avoid going through the research
| process again, then you should bid $X+Y.
| mort96 wrote:
| _Before_ I have made that initial decision, and before I
| have invested resources into evaluating what I think the
| value of a product is, I do not have a price in mind.
| Deciding on a price I think is fair for a product takes
| effort. The more accurately I want to determine it, the
| more effort it is.
|
| Could there exist some hypothetical subjective value? I
| mean maybe. But not one that I have knowledge of, so it's
| not something that can even hypothetically affect my
| behavior. The only time at which I could _possibly_ be
| aware of my own subjective value judgement of a product
| necessarily has to be _after_ I have invested time to
| evaluate it.
| retsibsi wrote:
| So what is the problem? You've done the research, and
| your best estimate for the value is $X. And if you had to
| put a dollar value on avoiding doing the research again,
| it would be $Y. You put in a maximum bid of $X+Y, walk
| away from the auction, and come back to see that you won
| at a lower price (great!), won at your max price (fine),
| or lost (also fine; $X+Y was right at the threshold of
| what you considered worth paying, even accounting for the
| extra research you'll now have to do. Maybe if you look
| at the final price and see that you lost by 1c, you'll
| feel annoyed... but if that's anything more than an
| irrational emotional response, then why didn't you bid 1c
| more in the first place? You were free to enter any
| number you wanted, and you knew in advance that this
| might happen. If it is just an irrational emotional
| response, you can avoid that next time by not looking at
| the final price unless you win.)
| mort96 wrote:
| Neither $X nor $Y are going to be hard dollar values. If
| I semi-arbitrarily pick some $X and some $Y, put in $X+$Y
| as my max bid, and lost the item due to $0.01, I would be
| annoyed _not_ due to some irrationality but because $X
| and $Y were never cent-accurate in the first place.
| retsibsi wrote:
| They'll never be cent-accurate, but if you've done a
| decent job then they should be in your zone of rough
| indifference. Then you can simply avoid that annoyance by
| not looking at the final price, safe in the knowledge
| that at worst you may have missed out on a marginally
| worthwhile purchase by marginally underestimating its
| value. If that's not the case, you didn't bid enough in
| the first place.
|
| (But also, how is the annoyance not irrational? Your
| estimates weren't cent-accurate, but they were just as
| likely to be slightly too high as slightly too low. And
| you haven't learned anything new about the true values --
| unless you take your emotional reaction to be new
| evidence. For your emotional reaction to be new evidence,
| it has to be somewhat unpredictable, otherwise you could
| have fully factored it in in advance. But you seem to be
| saying that you're predictably going to be annoyed by a
| 1c loss.)
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Adding a single grain of sand to a small pile of sand
| never turns it into a big pile of sand, yet big piles of
| sand exist... well, how is that possible?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
| retsibsi wrote:
| Yes of course I know the Sorites paradox (and I can give
| my take on it if you are interested), but what point are
| you making in the context of this discussion?
| pwg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Not just other bidders, but the engagement/SEO part of
| eBay's ranking algorithm.
| nutjob2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Are you sure the winner didn't just have a higher max bid
| than yours?
| pks016 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| globular-toast wrote:
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > It's always going to be a bad deal for the buyer.
|
| 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.
| blitzar wrote:
| Some items are poorly marketed - in the wrong category,
| missing a model number, listed as 1MB rather than 1GB,
| poorly described, poorly photographed etc.
|
| This either limits the number of bidders though worse
| discoverability or just less desirability and lower
| prices.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > 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.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| Ebay has filters to display sold listings, so when you're
| looking to buy something, check out the closed auctions
| and see what they're going for. If the prices are
| similar, you might as well buy from fixed-price listings,
| but if auction prices are lower, you can save a lot by
| being patient.
|
| You can also save searches for a fixed-priced listing
| below a specified value, and enable alerts, so that if
| someone lists something that's priced to sell, you can
| get it quickly.
| lazylizard wrote:
| 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.
| tempestn wrote:
| The instant outbidding is likely automatic due to you not
| having reached the previous bidder's entered bid.
| pishpash wrote:
| Scraping and buy for me bots cut out eBay. Sniping bots don't.
| j45 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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...
| jsheard wrote:
| 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 PS100, seller receives PS100, seller
| later charged PS5 fee, ends up with PS95.
|
| After: Buyer pays PS100, eBay pockets PS5 "buyer
| protection fee", seller receives PS95 with "no fees".
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| 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%).
| pwg wrote:
| > 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.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Only in the UK, and only on "private sellers". eBay is
| losing a lot of marketshare in the UK so they've taken
| drastic measures to try to get people listing again.
| wooger wrote:
| 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.
| mmsc wrote:
| Nothing? Don't forget when their security team sent pigs
| heads to people and terrorized them:)
| robin_reala wrote:
| I think I missed this...
| mmsc wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal
| robin_reala wrote:
| Wow! That was a read that kept on escalating.
| pwg wrote:
| 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.
| gpt5 wrote:
| 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.
| postalrat wrote:
| Except nobody uses it that way. Auctions are rare
| themselves. Sellers dont like it, buyers dont like it yet
| ebay won't change it.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| People will pay a premium to win, not everyone but enough
| to make it worth it.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > 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.
| kylecordes wrote:
| That seems like a good bit of psychology as it
| accommodates both people with the mental fortitude to
| type in their genuine max bid in the first place, and
| also people who don't really know what they're willing to
| bid until they see somebody else bid higher.
| mkl wrote:
| 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.
| qwertytyyuu wrote:
| For the auction house that is
| b800h wrote:
| For the seller.
| mkl wrote:
| For everyone. Sellers and auction house get a good price,
| and buyers don't get sniped.
| grogenaut wrote:
| 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.
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| ...that's what auctions are...being around to bid...
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Except for sealed bid auctions. EBay doesn't do sealed
| bid auctions, and that's fine.
| mcherm wrote:
| 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.
| giobox wrote:
| 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.
|
| > https://bringatrailer.com/how-bat-works/
| kylecordes wrote:
| Auction site design where most every transaction is a very
| material amount of money for buyer and seller probably have
| different trade-offs from something like eBay where most
| items are rounding errors compared to the income or wealth
| of the participants.
|
| For example, think about "sniping" from the seller side.
| Sellers are rightly concerned about any wrinkle of the
| bidding process that might leave money on the table.
| Automatically extending the time so that every potential
| buyer has time to "answer" a new bid soothes the concern
| that buyers were willing to pay higher, but they didn't
| have the technological prowess to post their bid in the
| last 0.3 seconds.
| b800h wrote:
| 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.
| Shank wrote:
| 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!
| cge wrote:
| 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.
| cornholio wrote:
| 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.
| mpeg wrote:
| Unless I'm missing something this is exactly how eBay
| works. You set a max bid and then it auto bids up to that
| amount so you can't get sniped unless they bid higher
| than your max.
|
| 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
| technothrasher wrote:
| 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.
| bayesnet wrote:
| 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.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| 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.
| sunrunner wrote:
| commit ecfd9009-5bae4398b13645e14ec4ce25 (HEAD -> deal-
| with-snipers) Author: sunrunner Date: Thu
| Jan 22 13:57:34 2026 +0000 Update BidBot
| default bid cents amount to be 18 (was 16), to deal with
| pesky sniping strategies discovered on HN.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| That's how whatnot does it as well (what eBay badly copied as
| eBay live)
| mpeg wrote:
| 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
| dspillett wrote:
| _> 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.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| > being able to snipe so favoured eBay with more of their
| attention and this brought more sellers to the platform
|
| Did they measure the impact of people who stopped using the
| platform due to their bids being sniped?
| dspillett wrote:
| Unsure (those reports I read were some time ago). Though
| that may be another reason why the built-in snipe-like
| tool was added, so appease those users as well as to
| decrease the load imposed by external tools.
| freedomben wrote:
| I would bet that they have. Personally I stopped using
| eBay because of sniping. I'm a particularly devastating
| case for them, because had the system not felt rigged to
| me then I likely would have continued on the site making
| many purchases. However it immediately made me lose
| confidence in the system and bail.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Bidding is open as long as there have been bids in the past
| 5 minutes.
|
| You also have to proportionally raise the bid increment, or
| you'll have people bidding $1 up at the end of every 5 minute
| period in order to exhaust and frustrate the person they're
| bidding against. Their opponent's only choices are 1) to
| mirror the $1 raises, which could go on for ages (then sleep
| and automation become issues), or 2) to make a big jump
| hoping that they jump past their opponents limit.
|
| In the case of 2) the dollar bidder's limit could be +$10,
| and there's no rational way for their opponent to choose the
| amount for a big jump other than jumping to their limit.
| Meaning that they just wipe away all of their potential
| bargain and get it for their valuation. Leaves a sour taste;
| feels like they're bidding against themselves.
|
| As somebody who auctions things, I use a required greater
| than "[?]10%" of the current bid amount bid increment, and
| the auction doesn't end on an item until there hasn't been a
| bid for 10 minutes. Works great. "[?]10%" means to just drop
| the last digit of the current bid to know the minimum next
| bid. Then I can set the auction to end an hour before I
| really want it to end; if it hasn't ended by then it's
| because I mispriced something and the right people found it.
|
| You capture all the value you can, and it runs completely
| unattended. You just need a way to timestamp bids and
| broadcast that timestamp e.g. a forum post.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| Pretty much every auction platform I've seen, except eBay,
| extends listings by a few minutes every time a bid is
| received.
| IOT_Apprentice wrote:
| Wow. I remember Ubid, and I bought several things from it. It
| would become problematic when folks would bid up things far
| beyond the starting price.
| Retr0id wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| duskdozer wrote:
| 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.
| blitzar wrote:
| I run up the prices in less competitive auctions just for fun
| occasionally, especially if I think someone is getting too
| good a deal.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| 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.
| ab5tract wrote:
| 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.
| gond wrote:
| 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?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The price, when between the seller's minimum and the
| buyer's maximum, is a zero sum game. So while this is
| definitely _screwing with people_ , the seller gets paid
| more and the amount of suffering in the world shouldn't
| really change.
| gond wrote:
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I am not having zero sun fallacy. Please read what I said
| again. I said the exact price is zero sum within the
| bounds of the deal happening. The wealth creation is
| caused by the deal happening at all.
|
| > if one quadrillionaire in a city owns all the money
|
| That's a valid risk factor but on a random eBay purchase
| I think it's fair to say we have no idea if the purchaser
| or the seller gets more utility out of each dollar.
| gond wrote:
| Then we actually agree on parts? Well, excuse me if I
| interpreted you wrong.
|
| >we have no idea if the purchaser or the seller gets more
| utility out of each dollar.
|
| Assumption: the seller opened the auction with his actual
| hard lower limit, he should be happy with what he gets as
| soon as that limit gets hit.
|
| The original poster said that he essentially altered the
| bid in favour of the seller. However, the exchange of
| subjective equal values is based on the balance between
| the two parties and now gets distorted in favour of the
| seller and in detriment of the buyer. This should result
| in win/lose if I am not mistaken.
|
| So, maybe I get you wrong, I am not sure right now.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I agree with everything you said there.
|
| My argument is that this distortion in favor of the
| seller isn't really good or bad in a meaningful way. It's
| just rude.
|
| The seller is happy as long as their limit is hit, the
| buyer is happy as long as their limit isn't hit. How
| should the surplus happiness get split? I dunno. So the
| earlier poster sticking their finger in and shifting the
| surplus around isn't a particularly moral issue.
| muvlon wrote:
| I don't think this is inflicting net suffering, really.
| The money doesn't just disappear, the seller gets it.
| Auctions are zero-sum.
| Retr0id wrote:
| They're not zero-sum on ebay because ebay takes a
| percentage cut
| pharrington wrote:
| You are not fun.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| Do you usually pay for the higher price you are offering?
| celeritascelery wrote:
| 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.
| gnopgnip wrote:
| Buy for me bots results in more returns, cancellations, item
| not as described and other problems ebay and sellers have to
| deal with
| pwg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 30EUR on
| an item that you would bid 50EUR on. This raises the price to
| 30EUR because of your automatic bids. The nibbler then bids
| 35EUR to see if that was enough and it still wasn't, losing you
| 5EUR from early bidding. If the nibbler thought he could get
| the item for 30EUR, you would only have to pay 30.50EUR 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.
| downrightmike wrote:
| No one wants AI to spend their money, checked or not. The few
| people who would want AI, want AI to save them money
| subroutine wrote:
| 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.
| akersten wrote:
| 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.
| pishpash wrote:
| 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.
| observationist wrote:
| "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.
| subroutine wrote:
| 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.
| observationist wrote:
| 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.
| subroutine wrote:
| 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.
| anonymous908213 wrote:
| > 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 $600 without so much as looking at their condition
| seems like an easy way to lose a lot of money.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Yeah literally price mistakes being picked up right away. But
| also seems like a good way to get scammed.
| Yizahi wrote:
| I wager the scammer industry looking for active bots and
| exploiting them would thrive. Automate creation of fake
| listings using throwaway accounts using popular keywords
| and arbitraging price lower and lower, and until automatic
| buyers start bidding, remember the price and delete
| listing. Recreate listing with that price from a separate
| account selling bricks for 600$, and voila - free money.
| jfyi wrote:
| 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".
| g947o wrote:
| I have decent tech company salary but I don't even buy $10
| books without checking everything. This week I almost bought
| a wrong book (manually) because how similar the title is.
| Automating stuff with AI is interesting, but I don't want the
| hassle of getting surprised and handling returns, if the item
| can be returned at all, especially on eBay.
| Yizahi wrote:
| I genuinely wonder, would you do that, really? Sure 600$ 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?
| some_random wrote:
| "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."
| subroutine wrote:
| 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?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| mnau wrote:
| I have no doubt we are going to get even worse bullshit
| tomorrow.
|
| Web got infested by ads, I wonder BS will agents use.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| You will end up with expensive scam parts.
|
| "Buy good quality for less than market value and don't get
| scammed" is so far beyond AGI complete that I cannot fathom
| how people think it will be reliably doable by LLMs
|
| I think it's telling though how everyone's example of how an
| AI agent can help you shop is "I want it to take advantage of
| someone else's mistake or knowledge asymmetry to make me free
| money".
|
| Are you all just embarrassed used car salespeople?
| WarmWash wrote:
| "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!"
| Terr_ wrote:
| [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!
|
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzKSQrhX7BM&t=0m13s)
| subroutine wrote:
| Sir, are you aware you are not drinking regular coffee, but
| Columbian decaffeinated coffee crystals?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 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.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| 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.
| subroutine wrote:
| 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?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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_.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| 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.
|
| That said, I guess that's not quite the sort of "buy for me
| AI" that eBay is after here
| estimator7292 wrote:
| 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.
| dankwizard wrote:
| 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
| Fwirt wrote:
| 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.
| g947o wrote:
| 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.
| nja wrote:
| 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?
| dankwizard wrote:
| 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.
| pwg wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| People definitely used to do that, yes.
| JDSP wrote:
| 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.
| wooger wrote:
| Even if they use Paypal?
| Havoc wrote:
| Yes sold a fair bit and never had issues with fee deductions.
| Think it's mostly deducted seller side
| syngrog66 wrote:
| I loved early eBay but gave up on it once became clear how rife
| it was with bid snipers, fraudsters and stolen goods.
| qwertytyyuu wrote:
| Oh so just "human review " it
| davedx wrote:
| Smells like an opportunity
| loudandskittish wrote:
| ...haven't bots been buying things off eBay since the 90s?
| TheCapeGreek wrote:
| Meanwhile Google announces UCP to go in completely the opposite
| direction (or make marketplaces like eBay do so)
| direwolf20 wrote:
| You don't have to obey user agreements.
| delaminator wrote:
| You do if you don't want to get banned.
| Yizahi wrote:
| I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
| mminer237 wrote:
| Is so far as you don't have to use the site, that's true, but
| they are legally enforceable, and you could absolutely be sued
| for breaking them if you upset eBay enough.
| qznc wrote:
| Is my primary user agent, my web browser, still allowed? /s
| delaminator wrote:
| 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;
| __jonas wrote:
| 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.
| darkxanthos wrote:
| 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.
| __jonas wrote:
| 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.
| andrew_lettuce wrote:
| This all sounds like janky, low margin day trading for
| physical crap.
| __jonas wrote:
| Yes! Sounds fun to me, not sure what you're getting at,
| it's not supposed to be a business idea! Just a tool I
| would enjoy having because I sometimes like to buy used
| things.
| mym1990 wrote:
| This is just "buy low, sell high" but automated. It is no
| different than what many humans do every single day, just
| at a much faster clip and with better processing power.
| Used car dealerships are a great example. If you think its
| dumb that humans try to find price mismatches in order to
| make money...well you may hate the idea of capitalism,
| which is probably a fair take.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > the AI could also create the listing as soon as the item is
| purchased.
|
| There are businesses doing the other way round: list a bunch
| of stuff, then once an order is placed find the item to
| fulfil it with.
| cortesoft wrote:
| This reminds me so much of an old World of Warcraft addon i
| used in 2005-6 or so... I believe it was called 'bottom
| feeder' or something.
|
| Basically, you would leave your character logged in sitting
| at the auction house. It would observe auctions for a while,
| and generate pricing data and sales data. Then, you would
| enable automatic mode, and it would automatically bid/buy any
| item that someone put up for sale if the price was much lower
| than normal.
|
| You would leave it running overnight, or whatever, then come
| back to go pick up all the items it bought, and then you
| would go back to the auction house and sell all your items
| you bought at the correct price.
|
| Basically, you would see buy auctions created by people who
| didn't realize what the correct price should be and sold too
| cheaply. Since this was an automated system, you could beat
| any human to take advantage of the deal.
|
| I made a ton of in game currency doing this.
|
| After a few months they changed the auction rules to prevent
| this... add-ons could no longer directly bid on items, and
| you had to sit there and click "buy" whenever the script
| found a good deal. This severely limited the amount you could
| make with the script.
|
| Basically this mirrors the eBay timeline, with the same
| reasons I am guessing... eBay (like WoW) doesn't want bots
| collecting arbitrage.
| j16sdiz wrote:
| 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.
| __jonas wrote:
| 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).
| maccam912 wrote:
| 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.
| TZubiri wrote:
| This was the premise of ChatGPT Pulse
| biophysboy wrote:
| This would be helpful only if you were the only person using
| it.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Does the tools and features ebay already has not meet this
| need?
|
| Can't you set up a saved search that ebay will notify you of?
|
| >"I want an old mini PC to use as a home server, it should have
| roughly these specs and cost under this amount"
|
| This is a bad example because at pretty much all times, there
| is sufficient inventory for you to find the actual item you
| want, so you don't need the "agent" to repeatedly check. In
| instances where there is limited inventory, saved searches have
| been the reliable solution for decades. It's how niche youtube
| channels have acquired niche hardware forever.
| asdff wrote:
| >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.
|
| You already can do that on ebay. Whatever terms get you
| ballpark results can become a search alert. You don't need to
| know the items you want exactly. And you get a handy email with
| the results of that alert when they hit, which you can scroll
| over in about ten seconds.
| amelius wrote:
| Speaking of which. Did anyone patent this 0-click buy method yet?
| MarginalGainz wrote:
| 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.
| cheschire wrote:
| 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
| the_gastropod wrote:
| 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?!
| andrew_lettuce wrote:
| eBay needs to focus attention, efforts and resources on
| this if it's an increasing problem so the alternative uses
| for those resources is a cost. If sellers like you get mad
| and don't list that costs them too.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Like etsy, they long since worked out that most volume is
| through dropshippers of products mass produced in China.
| Or a few physical businesses like houseclearers which can
| manage a high throughput. If you're a random private
| seller with a single item, you're an inconvenience to
| them.
| ramses0 wrote:
| "Power Sellers" - there was a statement that your
| business (for marketplace-type-business) needed to have
| an avenue to support "mega" suppliers for eventual
| symbiotic success.
|
| There was a business a while back that was like "pay
| $50-100 to carpool from SF to LA" and the post-mortem
| was: "your earning potential was limited, no power-seller
| support" b/c eventually just turn into a bus-driver/bus
| company. (Uber is an interesting contra-example).
|
| It's stuck with me as a quick analysis of business-types:
| how does the power-seller eventually make 10x, or at
| least 2x median wages?
| pjc50 wrote:
| Thinking a bit more, it would be quite handy to have a
| "power seller" AI for all my random junk. Spread it out
| on a table, pan a camera over it, then leave it to the
| computers until someone's willing to pay an amount for
| one of those objects that's worth the work of packing and
| shipping it.
| whatevermom4 wrote:
| This is a really cool idea. A sort of table where you
| just leave the stuff that you want to sell. There could
| be a dedicated tablet / computer where to interact with
| the AI (adjust prices, receive orders) and a little
| printer to print the shipping labels.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Until that AI can take the item, take photos, describe
| the item properly, drop it off a post office - I assure
| you, dedicated AI will only slow you down.
| 0x457 wrote:
| > There was a business a while back that was like "pay
| $50-100 to carpool from SF to LA" and the post-mortem
| was: "your earning potential was limited, no power-seller
| support" b/c eventually just turn into a bus-driver/bus
| company. (Uber is an interesting contra-example).
|
| I think Uber would absolutely turn into a bus company if
| their risk tolerance allowed for this. It did change from
| "I have a car and free time" to "I'm buying a car to be a
| full-time Uber driver"
| TZubiri wrote:
| Damn, I thought Etsy was supposed to be handmade,
| artisanal products from individuals or small businesses.
| But maybe they did that initially to build a reputation
| and then transitioned to chinese product dropshippers.
|
| What a fraud
| 0x457 wrote:
| I don't think it's Etsy fault other than allowing it. If
| someone is selling artisanal wooden cutting boards,
| someone will see it and think how they can do the same-
| ish, but with less overhead. Someone will also make "How
| I make money of etsy" video and sell their courses,
| probably to double-dip.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| Anecdotally, I see a lot of small sellers using FB
| marketplace. Those are cash/venmo type deals done in
| person. That might just be because I live in a big enough
| metro area to support that.
| im3w1l wrote:
| It's about a difference of degrees. If experiences like
| yours happen very rarely ebay is fine with it but if it
| become too common then sellers will leave which is
| obviously a huge loss for ebay.
| quietsegfault wrote:
| I only sell stuff on EBay as-is, no returns. I'm not sure
| if this protects me from their money back guarantee, but it
| gives me a little peace of mind until I too get bitten.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| IANAL: but if a seller misrepresents what they're selling
| then "As is" doesn't help them. If I sell you a Ferrari
| "as is" but I send you a kit car that looks like a
| Ferrari, "as is" ain't gonna help.
| the_gastropod wrote:
| Yep. Therein lies the rub. eBay inserts themselves as the
| middle-man here. But they take 0 responsibility for
| assessing disputes if a buyer claims an item was not as
| described. They just arbitrarily refund buyers, and
| automatically pay for the shipping fees from the sellers'
| connected bank accounts. To make matters worse, as a
| seller, as far as I know, you can't limit how much the
| buyer can spend on shipping. So, e.g., if someone on the
| other side of the planet buys something from you, pays
| for shipping, then says "item not as described", you're
| going to be on the hook for a large sum. I guess this
| happens rarely enough for most big sellers that it's
| worth continuing to use ebay. But for average schmo use-
| cases (like selling old household goods), it's a
| ridiculous risk.
| garbageman wrote:
| It doesn't hurt to add it....but it doesn't help as it's
| happened to me.
| xeromal wrote:
| Selling as is helps a bit but it only covers regret
| returns. If the item is not as listed such as claiming to
| be new but the packing is opened, you're still obligated
| to accept a return
| the_gastropod wrote:
| My listing was as-is, no returns. Didn't matter. And I
| tried challenging it. Recorded a video where I opened the
| returned machine, assembled it, and pulled a perfect shot
| of espresso. Based on my server's access logs, nobody at
| eBay even viewed the video. Whole experience cost me over
| $200 in shipping fees. Horrible experience.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Did you sue them?
| the_gastropod wrote:
| Over $200? No. I filed a complaint with the BBB, but
| that's as far as I took it.
| quietsegfault wrote:
| That stinks! I feel very lucky now that I've gotten away
| scot-free.
| burnte wrote:
| "Mint condition MacBook Pro M5, 64GB RAM, 2TB storage,
| midnight black, box only" and it sells for $1800 because
| someone didn't see "box only".
| direwolf20 wrote:
| ... Is fraud.
| NickC25 wrote:
| it is?
|
| I mean, it's deliberately misleading, but it's not fraud.
| If it says "box only", it means box only.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| The judge and jury aren't stupid. A legitimate auction
| for a box would be very upfront about the box and would
| not start the description identically to one for a
| laptop.
| malfist wrote:
| This reply has hallmarks of AI slop. Green name, 2x its not X
| its Y, em dashes.
|
| If you want to be a productive member try commenting what you
| put into your prompt instead of the slop that comes out.
|
| Also classic ai drivel: This is about protecting the business
| model, not their inventory. My brother in AI, eBay doesn't have
| inventory. They're a platform.
| Twixes wrote:
| This slop so annoying to see, and tiring - but worth it here
| - to call out.
| sh4rks wrote:
| Dead Internet theory
| calny wrote:
| I didn't catch that on first read, but I see why you'd say
| that. LLMs are ridiculous in the constant usage "it's not X
| it's Y" -- It's in almost every response from Opus 4.5. "It's
| not X it's Y" is ruined for regular writing.
|
| I'm also skeptical of anything that claims to reliably detect
| AI writing. FWIW, I plugged the comment into Pangram Labs,
| which claims to be the most reliably and seems to have worked
| well before. It categorized the comment as 100% human written
| with medium confidence.
| jsphweid wrote:
| Hallmarks of AI or AI slop? Or are you suggesting that AI is
| slop by definition?
|
| Let's assume it's a bot. Is the point it's making
| unreasonable? Is it really unreasonable to refer to eBay's
| listings as inventory?
| fwip wrote:
| 100%.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| What does green name signify on HN? I've always wondered.
| jacquesm wrote:
| New account, sub 400 karma, less than 30 days old iirc.
|
| See https://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments
| owenversteeg wrote:
| Yeah, it really says something about the state of HN these
| days that this account racked up (net) 261 votes in nine days
| writing absolute drivel.
| the_arun wrote:
| Another reason I could think of is Security. There is a bunch
| of cheating goes on there. As a seller I lost my laptop to a
| scammer. Seller paid be until I shipped & cancelled the
| transaction. Buyer asked me ship it to their son's address.
| Since I didn't use buyer's address registered in their eBay
| account eBay/Paypal didn't pay me either. AI accelerates these
| scams.
| rchaud wrote:
| I'd say it mostly has to do with limiting their own liability
| and reputational damage if an AI bot "hallucinates" and places
| hundreds of incorrect orders and sellers get hit with negative
| ratings and refund requests due to no fault of their own.
| calny wrote:
| Stated more cynically, many platforms have an interest in
| attention hijacking. Done well, agents' 'laser focused
| attention' could help users avoid wasting time (wandering
| attention) and money (impulse buys). This is a good thing, even
| if it dings revenue of some existing platforms. If a company's
| business model is impulse buying and ad revenue (this isn't
| eBay IMO), then good riddance.
| faefox wrote:
| Why not share your own thoughts rather than this LLM slop? Or
| maybe this is just a bot account. Either way, disappointing to
| see on HN.
| schnitzelstoat wrote:
| The bots are learning to defend themselves on social media
| _dark_matter_ wrote:
| Seriously, how is this the top comment?
| haritha-j wrote:
| Or probably even wrose, it actually shifts the attention and
| the wandering. That phase will happen inside the LLM, where the
| LLM decides which link to suggest, i.e. whoever pays the LLM
| the most. And worse yet, that will apply not just for products,
| but for platforms, so if amazon pays chatgpt more than ebay
| does, there goes your sale.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Open source models can short circuit that hopefully.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Or if eBay blocks ChatGPT while Amazon doesn't.
| haritha-j wrote:
| The same amazon that sued anthropic for their AI trying to
| order stuff on Amazon?
| pranavj wrote:
| This assumes the LLM ecosystem stays centralized. Open source
| models running locally or on user-controlled infrastructure
| flip this - the agent works for you, not for whoever pays the
| model provider.
|
| The race is already happening: open weights models are
| getting good enough that "your personal shopping agent"
| doesn't need to phone home to a company with ad incentives.
| The future probably looks more like ad blockers than ad
| platforms - agents that aggressively optimize for user
| preferences, not platform revenue.
| ikesau wrote:
| Nilay Patel is calling this "the DoorDash problem" and has
| written an essay on it here:
| https://www.theverge.com/podcast/823909/the-doordash-problem...
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Fewer companies get the chance to enshittify my experience?
| Sign me up!
| ikesau wrote:
| Right, but I suppose one issue is that, depending on how
| concentrated the AI agent market becomes, the rent seeking
| could eventually potentially just shift to these agents
| instead.
| ghjv wrote:
| --It's not X, it's Y?
| adam_arthur wrote:
| Comment definitely reads like AI
| johanyc wrote:
| Stop the ai witch hunt madness
| TZubiri wrote:
| I don't think the 'wandering attention' dissapears, rather it
| is pushed to the LLM product. It's more of a competitive
| transfer from the incumbent product category to the new one,
| it's not that the new product category 'fixes' the 'problem'
| IOT_Apprentice wrote:
| If I am able to find what I'm looking for and purchase it via
| AI why must I be subjected to advertising & promotion of items
| in have zero interest in? Amazon has made finding what I want
| painful. I suspect eBay is just as painful (I see to work
| there).
| nospice wrote:
| That's a cynical take, so it will probably get upvoted, but
| what are you basing it on?
|
| Ebay is a pretty eclectic marketplace and I can think of a
| number of possible reasons that have little to do with ads. For
| example, they may be worried about high error rates, and thus
| buyer and seller dissatisfaction. If I instruct an agent to buy
| X, eBay is almost never interchangeable with Amazon or Target.
|
| They have no problem surfacing their listings on Google
| Shopping.
| pranavj wrote:
| Great analysis of the real motivation here. But this feels like
| the record labels trying to ban MP3 players. You can protect
| the impression funnel today, but the trajectory is clear -
| consumers will increasingly delegate purchasing decisions to
| agents, and the platforms that adapt will capture that flow.
|
| The marketplace that builds "agent-friendly" commerce (verified
| listings, structured data, transparent pricing, API access)
| becomes the default backend for AI shopping. The one that bans
| agents becomes a legacy system humans have to manually navigate
| when the agent can't help.
|
| eBay's current business model may be a "nightmare customer" for
| AI agents, but that's a problem with the business model, not
| with the agents.
| ianferrel wrote:
| >The marketplace that builds "agent-friendly" commerce
| (verified listings, structured data, transparent pricing, API
| access) becomes the default backend for AI shopping.
|
| I'd like to believe this, but claims like this have been made
| since the early days of internet commerce. After all, it's
| not hard to specify structured data about items and run
| queries against it. But it largely has not materialized
| outside of a few special suppliers.
|
| You can't actually search Amazon or eBay or Wayfair for
| things with specified dimensions or characteristics. You can,
| however, find lots of listings for things like "Gzsbaby 6
| Piece Jumbo Dinosaur Toys for Kids 3-5 and Toddlers, Large
| Soft Dinosaur Toys for Lovers - Perfect Party Favors,
| Birthday Gifts "
|
| Perhaps this time is different? But why is it different? What
| economic incentives will lead to good structured data and
| transparent pricing, rather than whatever the AI equivalent
| of glurge/slop listings is?
| jjmarr wrote:
| Because agentic AI can parse unstructured data and make
| purchasing decisions regardless of whether your site allows
| it, which avoids the chicken-and-egg problem.
|
| It's similar to DoorDash. If your restaurant didn't want to
| sign up, they added you anyways and took orders on your
| behalf, then sent a physical courier over with a prepaid
| card to order takeout. Sometimes the menus were parsed
| incorrectly and customers blamed the restaurant.
|
| This forced restaurants to sign up, claim their page, and
| keep their menus up to date, since not offering delivery
| wasn't an option.
|
| At least 1 agentic AI tool will ignore these new terms and
| buy stuff on eBay anyways. Inevitably there'll be bugs or
| it won't get the best deal. At first this won't matter, but
| eventually competitors will offer a bug-free purchasing
| experience and consumers will move over.
| ianferrel wrote:
| >Because agentic AI can parse unstructured data and make
| purchasing decisions regardless of whether your site
| allows it, which avoids the chicken-and-egg problem.
|
| People can do that too, and also benefit from actual
| structured data. But the avoidance of the chicken and egg
| problem didn't seem to result in widespread structured
| data stores beating out the SEO-spam-style listings.
| dang wrote:
| We've been getting complaints about your account posting
| generated comments. Is that the case?
|
| (Generated comments aren't allowed here - we only want
| commenters who write in their own voice. More explanation at
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&q
| u...)
| superultra wrote:
| 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.
| aunty_helen wrote:
| 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.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Note that Stack Overflow has already ceased to exist.
| https://xcancel.com/marcgravell/status/1922922817143660783
| phyzix5761 wrote:
| How can they tell its AI buying if the agent uses the right user
| agent and works through a real browser?
| moduspol wrote:
| It may just be to stop third parties from creating a whole
| business out of "shop for me" AI bots. Individual users getting
| away with it might not be a problem, but with it being against
| ToS, it'd be a lot more shaky to build a business out of it.
|
| In fact, it may just be that eBay wants to be the business
| selling AI "buy for me" agents.
| dzonga wrote:
| 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
| cat_plus_plus wrote:
| Dumbest thing in the world, not wanting buyers who are ready to
| complete transaction the moment they find what they want. When my
| car broke down and cost too much to repair I described what I
| need - low mileage, big trunk, 40+ MPG, under certain price,
| close to dealership where my broken car sat in service. That I
| gave the query to Grok 4 Expert (because it does heavy web
| scraping), found a 2020 Ford Escape Hybrid and drove it away two
| hours later, because rationally speaking missing a lot of work in
| this economy is a bigger financial risk than missing $3000 on
| manual bargain hunting vs a good AI hunt. If any dealers blocked
| scaping on sales pages, too bad for them. Speaking of which, any
| good bargain / secondhand market AI agent friendly API?
| thunderfork wrote:
| And we enter the predicted cycle of "new thing that's going to
| Connect Everything"
|
| Just like faxes, the internet and the world wide web, sure, this
| new thing Could connect everything, but that's not nearly as much
| of a technical problem as a sociopolitical one. Same as it ever
| was.
| smusamashah wrote:
| This is so ironic, eBay generates AI descriptions for the things
| you are selling which is so stupid already.
| piinbinary wrote:
| Somehow, there's a relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/576/
| dlcarrier wrote:
| That's the first thing I thought of. I remembered the title
| text line about a Bobcat, but I had forgotten everything cost
| only $1, with free shipping.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I'm not at a point that I trust an AI agent to buy something for
| me on a place like eBay...
|
| ex: "...parts only", "foo for bar", ...
|
| How likely am I to get the wrong product entirely or something
| that I can't actually use.
| ukuina wrote:
| Only until Agent Commerce Protocol is more standardized:
| https://www.agenticcommerce.dev
| RadiozRadioz wrote:
| I don't see why this thing has much reason to be focused on
| agents or AI - a standardized API for ecommerce is useful
| regardless of that usecase.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| This does make me wonder. I see on HN (and hello if you see my
| comment) people who use screen scrapers or screen readers to read
| and use the web. I would be REALLY interested to know how many of
| these users use any of these newer AI browsers like Comet, I
| forget what the one from ChatGPT is called, but I know as a
| regular user I can make Comet do automated things like price
| comparisons across tabs and websites. I could totally see the
| immense value in someone who relies on a screen reader to access
| the web having access to an AI powered browser, but I don't know
| that any of them are designed with these users in mind
| necessarily.
|
| My question then becomes, does this policy violate the ADA for
| those users in particular? UIf it doesn't today, should it
| tomorrow? Especially if these AI browsers actually become viable
| for those users. Will there be a future where if you're protected
| by ADA you can be cleared to use a more automated browser? I
| would imagine a sane rule for such an exception would require you
| to fully identify yourself to the website in order to prevent
| abuse by bots pretending to need that type of access (the good
| old "trust me bro" problem). Or maybe they get to use it but it
| becomes more rate limited to the average user speed or whatever.
| tornikeo wrote:
| They want to avoid the fate of tailwind.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527950
| JangoSteve wrote:
| Anecdotally, I've noticed an uptick in my eBay feeds recently of
| items being immediately relisted after having supposedly sold.
| This has always happened occasionally, but within the past couple
| weeks, I've noticed it happening for like 25% of my watched
| items. I'm wondering if bots are buying things for which the
| owners are then canceling when it comes time to pay.
|
| I've also had to return a few items for which eBay's AI-generated
| description was wrong in ways that couldn't be verified in the
| product's images. I can only imagine the increase in
| canceled/returned orders from all the different AI features and
| bots.
| pranavj wrote:
| Banning AI agents is the new "banning mobile browsers." Companies
| tried that too in the early smartphone era - remember when sites
| blocked mobile user agents to force desktop views?
|
| The businesses that win will be the ones that build AI-agent-
| friendly interfaces, not the ones that try to ban them. eBay is
| protecting their ad revenue and impulse-buy funnel in the short
| term, but they're ceding the future to whoever figures out how to
| make agent-compatible commerce work.
|
| Every product and platform will eventually have an "agent API"
| alongside their human UI. The only question is who builds it
| first.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| If they don't currently see a way to make agent commerce work,
| the smart move is to stay alive long enough for someone else to
| figure it out then buy them or simply copy it. And if it never
| works out this will have been far cheaper in the medium run.
|
| I do not endorse this approach but it is well established in
| the tech industry.
| johnsmith1840 wrote:
| I think more likely we will unlock browser agents and no
| company will develop an agent api. They will have a user facing
| website used by agents or humans the same way.
|
| This also completely sidesteps any actions Ebay decides. It
| will have all credentials for them and mfa. To ebay this will
| look identical to the user with no real way to stop it.
| abroszka33 wrote:
| Who cares, it's my browser, it is for me to decide what I run,
| not for eBay. LLM, AdBlock or whatever else I want I will run it.
| terminalshort wrote:
| Of course you can run anything you want on your computer. But
| it is also ebay's right to decide whether or not its computer
| will allow requests from your computer.
| geocar wrote:
| > But it is also ebay's right to decide whether or not its
| computer will allow requests from your computer.
|
| That is dangerous thinking right there: Ebay does not have
| rights.
|
| Of course ebay may do it anyway, and it may take time for
| justice to correct things, but it is not Right, nor their
| right, to violate law _even_ to protect themselves.
| guywithahat wrote:
| Yes they do, as they should. Ebay is in an extremely
| competitive market and you have lots of other options, if
| you're abusing their service they need to be allowed to ban
| you. Imagine if Amazon wasn't allowed to ban scammers, or
| if they couldn't refuse a login portal to a user, allowing
| infinite attempts. It's important they get to decide
| whether to deliver a page to you, let alone keep you as a
| user.
|
| If we were talking about some government-run water utility
| then sure, it would different, but a private online store
| can ban users without ruining their life, and if you're
| opposed to this new rule you should stop using them in
| protest.
| geocar wrote:
| > > Ebay does not have the right ... to violate law even
| to protect themselves.
|
| > Yes they do, as they should.
|
| No they should not, and I cannot believe you could say
| any such thing in good faith.
|
| > if you're abusing their service they need to be allowed
| to ban you
|
| Who said anything about "abusing their service"?
|
| > Imagine if Amazon wasn't allowed to ban scammers
|
| Nobody is talking about banning scammers.
|
| Don't do this: Don't argue in bad faith. You can still
| disagree and think companies have the right to commit
| crimes, but you don't have to act like I'm saying
| something that I'm clearly not!
|
| > but a private online store can ban users
|
| Actually they can't, because we're now talking about
| _users_ instead of scammers and abusers: There 's
| something called the Americans for Disability Act, and it
| protects access to storefronts and no a private online
| store CANNOT ban users who need an accessibility tool.
| terminalshort wrote:
| > Ebay does not have rights
|
| No, that is the actual dangerous thinking. Ebay enjoys the
| same freedom of association that you do. Their right to not
| do business with you is exactly the same as your right to
| not do business with them. It's the very same right you
| exercise every time you use an add blocker.
| geocar wrote:
| > Their right to not do business with you is exactly the
| same as your right to not do business with them.
|
| You are incorrect about that. They are subject to the
| ADA. I am not.
|
| As a publicly listed company they have a tremendous
| number of other laws that apply to them and not to me.
|
| > It's the very same right you exercise every time you
| use an add blocker.
|
| Exactly: As an accessibility tool, it is _illegal_ for a
| company to deny service in the US (and Ebay is a US
| corporation, despite their Canadian roots) for the use of
| the tool.
| terminalshort wrote:
| Is ebay denying you service because you have a
| disability? If not, the ADA is completely irrelevant.
|
| > it is illegal for a company to deny service in the US
|
| No it isn't. If you want to claim this, cite statute.
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