esniper

esniper was a simple, lightweight tool for sniping ebay auctions. It runs on all flavors of linux, unix and Windows, and should adapt easily to other operating systems.

It does no longer work.

The development of esniper stopped in 2020 because ebay changed the login mechanism in a way we could not handle in the existing code.

You can download the source code of the latest released version, report bugs, and do a bunch of other things from sourceforge.net.

To be informed of new releases and major bugs, subscribe to the esniper-announce mailing list.

To compile and run esniper you need SSL and libCurl. Most recent linux releases should have these libraries already installed. If your system doesn't have these libraries or they are out of date, you will need to download, build and install these libraries first. You must build and install SSL before building and installing libCurl.

If you are using Windows, you will need to use either cygwin or MinGW and MSYS for a development environment, and SSL and libCurl. I hope to have a prebuilt Windows binary available in the future.

If you need documentation, you can read the manual page, or download a unix man compatible version and place it in /usr/local/man/man1 on your computer.

esniper can use configuration and auction files to tell it how to bid and what to bid on. Sample files (configuration, auction) are available.

If you want to be notified of updates to esniper, subscribe to the esniper-announce mailing list.

FAQ:

• What is sniping?
  • Sniping is the act of bidding on an auction with just a few seconds remaining.
• Why snipe?
  • Because it is better than bidding early. For more information on sniping, including reasons for and against, click here.
• What's wrong with bidding early?
  • In a perfect world, nothing. The world isn't perfect, though. Most eBay bids are proxy bids. If everybody understood that, figured out how much they wanted to pay, and bid their maximum, sniping would not be useful. However, many bidders have no idea how much they want to pay, so they bid in small increments until they beat your proxy. If you bid your maximum at the end of the auction, you greatly reduce the chances of being bid up by such a bidder.
• Is sniping against eBay policy
  • No. You may bid at any time in an eBay auction.
• I think sniping is evil
  • You are entitled to your opinion, but you may want to check out this very comprehensive site first so you can make an informed decision.
• Is using a program to snipe against eBay policy
  • This is a difficult question to answer. In paragraph 7 of eBay's user agreement, "you will not user any ... automatic device, or manual process to monitor or copy our web pages". From this, it appears just reloading an auction page a few times could be illegal (manual monitoring). Auction services which automatically retrieve closing prices, such as Andale and PayPal, seem to go against this clause, too.
• When I try to run esniper, it complains it can't find cygwin1.dll
  • Did you download cygwin1.dll and place it in the same directory as esniper.exe?
• What is cygwin1.dll, anyway?
  • It is part of cygwin, a package that emulates unix on top of Windows.
• esniper is complaining about a CAPTCHA. What's that?
  • It's a security measure to prevent 'bots (like esniper) from working. See here for more details.
    When eBay asks to solve a captcha this might be related to a weak eBay password. Try to change your password.