[__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.

[asdff]

>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.

You already can do that on ebay. Whatever terms get you ballpark results can become a search alert. You don't need to know the items you want exactly. And you get a handy email with the results of that alert when they hit, which you can scroll over in about ten seconds.

[Terretta]

Sure, sure, and next you'll tell me there's a way to know which side of the car the gas cap is on.

[darkxanthos]

The purchasing itself can important for it to jump on a great price. Maybe it finds what you're looking for at 1a while you're sleeping for example. Also if this were a business and you were going to resell it the AI could also create the listing as soon as the item is purchased.

[cortesoft]

This reminds me so much of an old World of Warcraft addon i used in 2005-6 or so… I believe it was called ‘bottom feeder’ or something.

Basically, you would leave your character logged in sitting at the auction house. It would observe auctions for a while, and generate pricing data and sales data. Then, you would enable automatic mode, and it would automatically bid/buy any item that someone put up for sale if the price was much lower than normal.

You would leave it running overnight, or whatever, then come back to go pick up all the items it bought, and then you would go back to the auction house and sell all your items you bought at the correct price.

Basically, you would see buy auctions created by people who didn’t realize what the correct price should be and sold too cheaply. Since this was an automated system, you could beat any human to take advantage of the deal.

I made a ton of in game currency doing this.

After a few months they changed the auction rules to prevent this… add-ons could no longer directly bid on items, and you had to sit there and click “buy” whenever the script found a good deal. This severely limited the amount you could make with the script.

Basically this mirrors the eBay timeline, with the same reasons I am guessing… eBay (like WoW) doesn’t want bots collecting arbitrage.

[pjc50]

> the AI could also create the listing as soon as the item is purchased.

There are businesses doing the other way round: list a bunch of stuff, then once an order is placed find the item to fulfil it with.

[__jonas]

I can't think of a scenario in which me buying some used stuff on ebay is that serious to be honest, having the AI buy would be a huge risk as well.

> Also if this were a business and you were going to resell it the AI could also create the listing as soon as the item is purchased.

That sounds like an awful grift, but good point, people might use such a system for that.

[maccam912]

I essentially do this but on a state surplus auctions site. It's just a scheduled action which searches for something, e.g. old Lego kits, once a week. Usually nothing comes up but at least once there are kits I know about it.

[mrguyorama]

Does the tools and features ebay already has not meet this need?

Can't you set up a saved search that ebay will notify you of?

>“I want an old mini PC to use as a home server, it should have roughly these specs and cost under this amount”

This is a bad example because at pretty much all times, there is sufficient inventory for you to find the actual item you want, so you don't need the "agent" to repeatedly check. In instances where there is limited inventory, saved searches have been the reliable solution for decades. It's how niche youtube channels have acquired niche hardware forever.

[edmundsauto]

I found this interesting to think about. On the surface, this could fit the requirements. However, in the past decade, I feel a dynamic where my relationship with tech companies like eBay are actually antagonistic, rather than cooperative. They (and American society) have become so extractive and user-hostile that I have no trust their features are designed to accomplish my goals. Instead, they are designed to accomplish the company's objectives and it's only by coincidence if the customer is satisfied.

[torginus]

I thought botting on ebay has been forbidden since forever, LLM or otherwise. This isn't so much a policy change as an affirmation that existing policy still applies.

[j16sdiz]

I would expect a naive implementation would give you a "least worse" option everyday and can't judge when it is "good enough"

Afterall, that's what most people would be when asked to make decisions for others without context.

Making the agent understand your requirements would be quite a bit of work.

[__jonas]

Yeah that's very possible, I have never built anything with LLMs and I'm not a heavy user so I'm not sure how feasible it is.

I do think I would already get value from a least worse option every day, a sort of 'digest', so I don't have remember, and to look through results myself. I think it's a best case for LLM use for me, there is no harm at all in false negatives or positives, there are no significant stakes and I think the vagueness / unpredictability of the output is an advantage, it might find something that I had not even considered (like for my example: here is a used laptop with roughly these specs, it could also be a good home home server, something like that).

[biophysboy]

This would be helpful only if you were the only person using it.

[TZubiri]

This was the premise of ChatGPT Pulse