Forum - View topicA lot of bots on eBay now?
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potatochobit
 Posts: 1373 Location: TEXAS |
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if I was going to make a dating sim, I would use 'biddig on ebay' as one of the real life challenge events, lol
lately, I've come across two issues not sure if it's always been like this or I just became more sensitive to it recently but every time I list items on ebay people send me private messages asking for discounts. my stuff is usually priced the same or below as ordering from japan, so i'm not pulling on anyone's arm or leg. for instance, I'll have a brand new figma on sale for 25$ as a buy it now option and I'll get messages asking for me to lower the price to 20$... Sure man, I'll give you a deal. maybe it's the recession? the other issue is bots now, if everyone bids the max they want to pay there is no problem but we all like discounts, right? in this pic there are 1.00$ bid increments literally in 1 second. this has to be a bot, or am I taking crazy pills? not that I care, I will admit to using bots in crappy video games, but this has to be a bot, right? 
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chichiriNoDa
 Posts: 532 |
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No it's not bot and definitely not you. It's really how eBay works. Say you are selling something for $5 and someone bid to it, but that bidder bid a maximum amount of $30 for it. So that's where the seemingly bot come in to play. eBay automatically bid I believe a dollar or some percent more if there is a new bidder so every time that new bidders bid it will automatically bid a dollar more for the previous bidder until it gets outbid.
I hope that helps your problem. |
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chronoclast
Posts: 97 |
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It's not bots doing the bids. It's incremental bidding done by ebay. http://pages.ebay.com/help/buy/bid-increments.html
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zawa113
 Posts: 7360 |
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Can you get a picture showing the automatic bids? It's an option at the top right of the bidding list, it's impossible to get the full story without it. They show up a paler grey (and the star next to a name will also be grey). If these were automatic bids showing up in the interim, they'd be paler grey and only the actual placed bid/current highest automatic bid would show up in black. What might be likely is that the current highest bidder (whose max bid is almost certain $23.57) placed one bid, and the other guy went a little crazy and kept going. Yes, it's far less intelligent than placing one bid and being done with it, but I see it happen all the time. Once you have bid once, you can use the "one-click bid". If that person really only bid $23 one time, none of those others bids would have shown up in black with a colored star, so I do think he abused the hell out of one-click bid or maybe he is using a bot (I know they exist)
Also, what is the total bid number? Automatic bids don't count as bids in the grand count, only things that someone physically entered into the system. Although if the winning bid is less than their max bid (not that you can tell), then that counts as one too. |
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potatochobit
Posts: 1373 Location: TEXAS |
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there were 24 bids placed, most from that one account in the last 2mins of the auction listing.
now, if it is ebay's "incrimental" bidding system why does it only work for this "one person?" why didn't it do the same thing when I placed two bids, MUCH higher than the current bid price. and if so, what happens if the auction ends with that "one second' the system is trying to place ten, 1$, bids. |
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zawa113
Posts: 7360 |
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The "incremental" bid is the automatic bid system. It bids for you by the minimal amount up to your max bid (if someone ties it, it goes with who did it earlier). These were almost certainly not automatic incremental bids that I'm seeing though. I'm curious just wtf happened here, so a picture with the auto bids would help me decipher this better.
If you placed higher than the current bid, but not higher than the highest bidder's hidden max bid, eBay auto incremental bids to the highest bidder's max bid. So if it's at $20, you bid $30, but the hidden max bid is $40, then $31 would show up in the other person's favor. Only whoever bid can see their max bid (seller can't see it either). If you then went for $38, it would show up $39 in their favor still. If you then bid $42, it would show up as $41 in your favor. It's also possible that this person increased their max bid more than once, those count as multiple bids. Whatever they did still clearly looks incredibly stupid to me, but it's hard to tell without the automatic bids. It's possible they flooded it with bids to either attract people or make them back off as a psychological tactic. If the item is at $30 now, with Bidder A winning, let's say their max was $31. Concerned, they could place another max bid for $35, but it would still show up as $30 with Bidder A winning. But it could also be assurance to make sure they win it at any cost by just hammering away on the one-click bid button. Even if it seems no one else is bidding, never know when one could suddenly come in and knock them off the highest bidder. I don't quite know how the last second things work though because I never bid at the last second. I honestly don't think there are as many bots as people think (at least not for anime or manga), and it's pretty easy to beat them by simply making your bid look lower than it really is. They only seem to go for minimal increase and can't think much. But I've seen auctions end and the winner/price changes by the time the page reloads. In those cases, I try to psyche the other person out, because a lot of people don't just place a max bid and be done with it, they play risky and bid only the minimal amount and hope that having a faster internet connection will win. But this is how I do things like this: Bidder A: $18 Bidder B: $18.50 Me: noticing a trend of only going 50 cents at a time between two idiots: $19.51, but it shows up as $19 because of the auto bid. Bidder A: $19.50 at the very last second Me: shows up that I won by a penny. So that's kinda how automatic bids work. Just because I bid $19.51 doesn't mean that it'll show up to be that price, it shows up as the lowest possible price based on my max bid. If someone goes close to my max bid, it goes into the next 50 cent increment (in that range, it becomes $1 after like $25 or something) up to my max, even if it's only a penny over. If you were to look at the history of this auction though, $19 would only show up as an automatic bid, even though with the auto bids shown, it maps out what happened far more clearly. It looks like the winning bid here was place at 17:26:06. The crazy guy placed a bid at 16:50:17, but all of the other bids came after 17:26:12, so they were probably desperately playing catch up one bid increment at a time like an idiot (more technically, one-click bid only goes by one increment more). I would bet that with automatic bids shown, there's one of the winner in between every one of crazy guy's one-click bids up til the last one. At least that is how I best decipher the situation. Just to clarify, the guy who bid a lot, we'll call him p***69, did not get auto bids form eBay, but the winner did. |
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