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eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

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Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#161

Post by mpeg »

cornholio wrote: post #159
cge wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bi…

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…

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

Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#162

Post by mpeg »

BeetleB wrote: post #32
whyenot wrote: post #12

So scraping bots and “buy for me” bots are bad, but the incredibly annoying sniping bots are OK? That sure feels like a double standard.

I never understood why eBay set things up to enable sniping. Many years ago, there was an auction site called uBid. They had the sane rule: Bidding is open as long as there have been bids in the past 5 minutes. So the end date could be January 24th, 3pm, but if someone bids at 2:58pm, the deadline is extended to 3:05pm. And it keeps going. You know, like how auctions in the real world work.

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

Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#164

Post by JohnFen »

cm2187 wrote: post #111
JohnFen wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#165

Post by blitzar »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #128
globular-toast wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 the…

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.

Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#166

Post by __jonas »

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.

Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#167

Post by jfyi »

dawnerd wrote: post #52
observationist wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 auto…

Yeah literally price mistakes being picked up right away. But also seems like a good way to get scammed.

I agree, and in aggregate it becomes a serious issue for the platform. People who buy autonomously are going to argue personally when it fails in any way.

I'm not sure how they would intend to stop it with this policy anyway. It at best is going to be an arms race detecting them. What it does do is prevent upfront the ham handed excuse of "I didn't bid on this, my bot did".

Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#168

Post by dspillett »

BeetleB wrote: post #32
whyenot wrote: post #12

So scraping bots and “buy for me” bots are bad, but the incredibly annoying sniping bots are OK? That sure feels like a double standard.

I never understood why eBay set things up to enable sniping. Many years ago, there was an auction site called uBid. They had the sane rule: Bidding is open as long as there have been bids in the past 5 minutes. So the end date could be January 24th, 3pm, but if someone bids at 2:58pm, the deadline is extended to 3:05pm. And it keeps going. You know, like how auctions in the real world work.

> I never understood why eBay set things up to enable sniping.

I've seen studies on auction method that suggest the difference in the final price (between explicit end time and the more traditional extend-until-bidding-stops method) is negligible for online auctions except in a few special cases. This is a marked difference from the expectation that, like a real-world in-person auction, the extending deadline might encourage further spur-of-the-moment bidding.

Whether it makes much difference to the final price or not is immaterial though if the buyers believe that it does. This is one of the (several) reasons why eBay won out against similar competition in the early days: buyers felt they were getting a better deal by being able to snipe so favoured eBay with more of their attention and this brought more sellers to the platform (which attracted more buyers, and so on round the loop). It is telling that to deal with the extra load imposed on the system by external bots refreshing pages and putting in automated bids, instead of switching to an extending auction model they implemented what is almost a built-in sniping feature.

Auction sites have to be very careful (or just very lucky) in their messaging, to convince both sellers and buyers that they are getting a good deal - any major change to how eBay works could upset the balance that they currently have in that regard and start a flood in the other direction (the more people leave, the more other people will think about leaving) to the building toward critical mass that was how they won out in those early days.

Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#169

Post by retsibsi »

mort96 wrote: post #137
ryandrake wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 cashi…

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.

Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#170

Post by mort96 »

retsibsi wrote: post #169
mort96 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cashi…

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…

I don't see why I would buy something if I'm indifferent to whether I buy the thing.
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