CyberFOX Software Inc.

Greetings,

eBay recently launched their Bid Assistant, which acts similarly to JBidwatcher’s Multisniping feature, except without the sniping.

None the less, it’s good to see them adding features JBidwatcher had six years ago.

Being serious for a moment, I’m actually really happy to see them do this. It’s a straightforward feature, and one they should have had long since. If they make it easy to use it’ll increase bid volumes, and thereby their end revenue. Speaking as an ex-employee, and a shareholder, this is great!

I always considered multisniping a ‘good for eBay’ feature, because it meant one bid could get applied to a number of items, without the user really intervening after the initial setup.

It’s also a hint that they might still be putting new ideas into their platform, which I’m very happy to see. It also ups the ante for programs like mine, to add more extensive algorithmic bidding. (e.g., ‘If I win this, THEN put a snipe on that, because if I can combine shipping I’d want them both…’)

What it is not, is sniping. Specifically:
You cannot schedule bids to be placed at a specific time.
The first version of JBidwatcher that included Multisniping was December 16, 2001, and is the earliest implementation of bid groups / multisniping / bid assistant functionality that I know of. It’s not world changing, but I’m proud of it.

Best of luck with your auctions!

– Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2007 at 8:37 pm and is filed under algorithms, jbidwatcher, ebay, sniping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.