How about a $1 bill priced at $2 w/free shipping? From every angle, it would be an interesting experiment. From the consumer's standpoint, it challenges the notion of free shipping. From a seller's standpoint, it challenges the notion of easy money (would you really want to stuff a thousand envelopes if the item sold well?). From the middleman's standpoint, it might help to identify bots (or possibly even money laundering).
A neat bot would be one which automatically buys and then resells things with a markup. It would figure out the usual price an item goes for on a website like Ebay, and purchase it if the price is set far enough below.
Many people do this in the World of Warcraft auction house using a tool called Auctioneer. Was one of my favorite parts of the game back when I played.
A classic case of arbitrage. But it seems to me that it would be quite hard to achieve on ebay. You need to have very little overhead, mailing stuff isn't usually that cheap.
Drop shipping --send things directly from seller to buyer-- is allowed on ebay but has many restrictions.
It would be very interesting to see if you could get some heuristics that choose products that are at least moderately useful instead of screen protectors and (exploding) batteries for various mobile phones.
I have always wanted to try something like this with stocks or commodities. Make a bot watch the market, and buy and sell. I even got far enough to imagine some sort of genetic filtering, aka give the master bot 10k, then it distributes it to 10 bots, all which are slightly different, they spend it, the master takes any profit above 1k and invests it in another bot that is a combination of the best 2. Etc. That way your max loss would be 10k, and you might make some money.
Instead of running it once per day, you could run it hourly. Rank the items with the same algorithm, but take into account time left on the auction. An item expiring soon that scores really high could be purchased early so it doesn't get away. Items expiring later could be watched and dumped if the price goes too high, or determined to be worth the extra expense, if the amount is available in savings, so the more expensive good items don't get away either.
How do you make sure you order tangible items? Lots of intangible items sell on eBay, like ebooks and other digital goods. Wouldn't this undermine the goal of receiving packages?
This reminds me of the artwork by Caleb Larsen, A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter. It's a box that sells itself on eBay for a higher price. As a condition of buying it, you accept it can sell itself again, and so on.
trademe is pretty much just the New Zealand version of ebay (albeit with a better reputation and more engaged community). They are also impressive because they cloned ebays business model early enough to prevent ebay from dominating the New Zealand online auction sector (as ebay did in Australia with ebay.com.au) and sold in 2006 for $700 million (NZD) ($550m in USD).
Just a small announce on HN, and the site is down.
Why does most blog software fail at simple tasks like delivering static content? Apart from comments and quick corrections, blog articles _are_ nothing more than static content. And I'd be happy to not see any comments due to high server load, as long as I can read the article.
The Wordpress default install is horribly slow out of the box. The sad reality is that most blog software is not tuned to serve any reasonable number of pageviews by default.
It's one reason why letting someone manage all that for you makes sense. (Shameless plug) At Weebly we spent a lot of time making sure that our blogging engine is very optimized. We have free users -- they don't pay us any money, we don't place any ads on their site, and they even use their own domain -- hit the front page of Digg/Reddit/HN all the time, and we can easily handle it in stride.
It's working again now. Although I had to lower the number of maxworkers to get it stable, so it may be slow.
And yeah, I'll be investigating why it's so slow tomorrow after the heat dies down. I think this is the first time that wordpress instance has served more than a few hits per day, so I'm kinda not surprised it's gone horribly wrong.
Needs to be quite intelligent to filter out a lot of product noise.
A lot of this is due to pricing manipulation whereby a price is low but the shipping is high. Also a lot of the products with the biggest savings aren't that useful :)
We've managed to improve the value of the list but are constantly tweaking it to get a good balance of savings and useful products listed.
Its especially important as we use a bot to auto-tweet the best saving of the day through twitter & facebook. Trying to get a bot to do this sometimes produces unintended (and often interesting) results.
Why just restrict the search to buy-now items? In my experience more of the esoteric stuff seems to go on straight auctions and buy-now is used mainly by commerical retailers.
Yes, I plan to support things other than buy-now. This was just the simplest way to get something running.
My plan is to have it wake up every hour, check if it's won something in the last 24h, and if not then do a search for items to bid on that are closing in the next hour.
In the book "Webbots, Spiders and Screen Scrapers" by Michael Schrenk, there's a topic that deals with automatic procurement and 'sniping' for those who are interested in reading further.
I would pay $20 to have this set up for two weeks for me. That would give you $6 you could keep for yourself. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Business here possibly?
If the Apple App Store had an API, I would be tempted to write a bot to buy me a highly rated app every ~3 days.
Didn't try very hard, but I was unable to determine whether the Android Market has an API for purchasing paid apps. In that case, the Android phone could be the bot! "Bzzzzztt. I bought this app for you. Hope you like it."
Silent prayer for your soul, only $1, no shipping cost!
No, seriously, I like his crazy optimistic attitude. Probably get some fun stuff out of it. Non the less, there are really people selling this kind of enlightened service on eBay, not for $1 though.
Considering the environmental impact of door to door shipping and the low chance the items will get any significant use, it's almost like the program is optimized to promote global warming over any other goals.
This would be much more interesting if he spent the money on auction items, instead of "Buy Now" stuff where the value is not much more than the price.
[+] [-] niyazpk|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qjz|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JonnieCache|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xenophanes|15 years ago|reply
Maybe then you start putting bizarre titles and explain what you're selling in a field his bot doesn't worry about.
And don't forget you can calculate how much money the bot has available from its Twitter feed, so you can price accordingly!
[+] [-] nayanshah|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mike-cardwell|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] albertsun|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stygianguest|15 years ago|reply
It would be very interesting to see if you could get some heuristics that choose products that are at least moderately useful instead of screen protectors and (exploding) batteries for various mobile phones.
[+] [-] cosmicray|15 years ago|reply
and, oh BTW, people are already doing this ;_;
[+] [-] templaedhel|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Robin_Message|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bieh|15 years ago|reply
Any questions, or suggestions for smarter ways to select items to buy, feel free :)
[+] [-] bieh|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tcdent|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bieh|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xenophanes|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkokelley|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimfl|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Robin_Message|15 years ago|reply
Recursion, profit, AI - what's not to like? You can see its latest auction at http://atooltodeceiveandslaughter.com and more about the artwork at http://caleblarsen.com/projects/a-tool-to-deceive-and-slaugh...
[+] [-] heyrhett|15 years ago|reply
He didn't actually make the $1-buying ebay bot from xkcd.
He made a completely different buying bot for some new zealand auction site: trademe.
[+] [-] spectre|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vog|15 years ago|reply
Why does most blog software fail at simple tasks like delivering static content? Apart from comments and quick corrections, blog articles _are_ nothing more than static content. And I'd be happy to not see any comments due to high server load, as long as I can read the article.
[+] [-] steveklabnik|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drusenko|15 years ago|reply
It's one reason why letting someone manage all that for you makes sense. (Shameless plug) At Weebly we spent a lot of time making sure that our blogging engine is very optimized. We have free users -- they don't pay us any money, we don't place any ads on their site, and they even use their own domain -- hit the front page of Digg/Reddit/HN all the time, and we can easily handle it in stride.
[+] [-] bieh|15 years ago|reply
And yeah, I'll be investigating why it's so slow tomorrow after the heat dies down. I think this is the first time that wordpress instance has served more than a few hits per day, so I'm kinda not surprised it's gone horribly wrong.
Mirror at http://bieh.net.nyud.net/2010/11/08/xkcd-576/
[+] [-] happybuy|15 years ago|reply
What I found was that the biggest savings list:
http://www.happybuy.com/search//by-savings/
Needs to be quite intelligent to filter out a lot of product noise.
A lot of this is due to pricing manipulation whereby a price is low but the shipping is high. Also a lot of the products with the biggest savings aren't that useful :)
We've managed to improve the value of the list but are constantly tweaking it to get a good balance of savings and useful products listed.
Its especially important as we use a bot to auto-tweet the best saving of the day through twitter & facebook. Trying to get a bot to do this sometimes produces unintended (and often interesting) results.
[+] [-] danio|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bieh|15 years ago|reply
My plan is to have it wake up every hour, check if it's won something in the last 24h, and if not then do a search for items to bid on that are closing in the next hour.
[+] [-] patrickk|15 years ago|reply
See #19 on the section list for a description:
http://www.schrenk.com/nostarch/webbots/DSP_inside.php
(Not affiliated in any way.)
[+] [-] ryanjmo|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qq66|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hallmark|15 years ago|reply
Didn't try very hard, but I was unable to determine whether the Android Market has an API for purchasing paid apps. In that case, the Android phone could be the bot! "Bzzzzztt. I bought this app for you. Hope you like it."
[+] [-] Seth_Kriticos|15 years ago|reply
No, seriously, I like his crazy optimistic attitude. Probably get some fun stuff out of it. Non the less, there are really people selling this kind of enlightened service on eBay, not for $1 though.
[+] [-] trotsky|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] known|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gokhan|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] michael_dorfman|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bergie|15 years ago|reply