Oh so just “human review “ it
eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update
91–100 of 363 posts
Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"…
another group.. i am looking for a bargain not a bidding war. i dont know what is my price ceiling but i know i will only increment twice. if someone outbids me instantly twice in a row i dont want the thing anymore.
The instant outbidding is likely automatic due to you not having reached the previous bidder's entered bid.
Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
For the auction house that is
Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I run up the prices in less competitive auctions just for fun occasionally, especially if I think someone is getting too good a deal.
Question: what kind of fun you are referring to here?
Since, from the outside, it surely sounds like you get pleasure by inflicting some form of suffering on others. But that hopefully isn’t considered fun, is it?
Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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.
Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update
#96Earlier 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.
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…
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?
Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I guess that makes sense for some people. I'm just not in a financial position where I'd let an AI buy a $600 used guitar without me taking a look at it first.
An '82 stratocaster would normally go for around $2000, so someone offloading an estate, fat fingering a price entry, etc, could give you a chance to double your money or more. $600 would be a very low price - same for a Martin D18 in fair+ condition, no cracks, etc. If I were going to automate something like this, I'd have a suite of products to watch for - common enough to be reasonably frequent but obscure enough…
> 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.
Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
eBay is hyper aggressive about fingerprinting, they will catch things like it trivially. Browsers leak all sorts of information like what sockets are open on localhost, making yourself look like an actual person is very challenging to someone motivated to detect you.
LLMs don't need browser automation though. Multimodal models with vision input can operate a real computer with "real" user inputs over USB, where the computer itself returns a real, plausible browser fingerprint because it is a real browser being operated by something that behaves humanly.
But will they behave like same user in past? I would guess there is lot of difference between how bot accesses page and real user has historically accessed them. Like opening multiple tabs at one time, possibly how long going through next set takes. How they navigate and so on.
There might be lot of modelling that could be done simply based on words used in searches and behaviour of opening pages. All trivially tracked to user's logged in session.
Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I run up the prices in less competitive auctions just for fun occasionally, especially if I think someone is getting too good a deal.
You are not fun.
Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update
#100So 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.
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.