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 to be mispriced, kinda the whole idea behind secondhand ocmmission / antique / estate sale shops.

I don't know how EBay is supposed to differentiate automation from real users in this scenario. To get around it, all you need is human intervention at the last act, so you could fire up your bot and have it forward the "buy now" link when all parameters are met? Maybe they just don't want AI companies to have an argument for some sort of revenue sharing or commissions.

I agree, and in aggregate it becomes a serious issue for the platform. People who buy autonomously are going to argue personally when it fails in any way.

I'm not sure how they would intend to stop it with this policy anyway. It at best is going to be an arms race detecting them. What it does do is prevent upfront the ham handed excuse of "I didn't bid on this, my bot did".

I wager the scammer industry looking for active bots and exploiting them would thrive. Automate creation of fake listings using throwaway accounts using popular keywords and arbitraging price lower and lower, and until automatic buyers start bidding, remember the price and delete listing. Recreate listing with that price from a separate account selling bricks for 600$, and voila - free money.

I don't understand why you're putting the joke here. I mean yeah they'll probably start putting ads in, but that's a whole different topic.

Sir, are you aware you are not drinking regular coffee, but Columbian decaffeinated coffee crystals?

The LLMs are being used to hack around the fact that while the software mostly works for what people need any given user inevitably has a few workflows that are clunky or highly manual.

Stuff that used to have to be laboriously scripted can now be pseudo code.

More importantly, doing this will quickly get throttled on the provider side (if using chat UI) or costs will skyrocket (if using APIs).

The right way to use LLMs here is to have them write (and perhaps maintain) scraping scripts and run those.

I would. I would in particular like to review the cart in form of a table rendered in LLM interface, because all e-commerce sites have bullshit. user-hostile UI/UX and I'm tired of it.

Really, dealing with bullshit for you is by far the biggest promise of any agentic solutions today.