Comment by darkxanthos
1 month ago
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
This all sounds like janky, low margin day trading for physical crap.
Yes! Sounds fun to me, not sure what you're getting at, it's not supposed to be a business idea! Just a tool I would enjoy having because I sometimes like to buy used things.
This is just "buy low, sell high" but automated. It is no different than what many humans do every single day, just at a much faster clip and with better processing power. Used car dealerships are a great example. If you think its dumb that humans try to find price mismatches in order to make money...well you may hate the idea of capitalism, which is probably a fair take.