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these libraries or they are out of date, you will need to download, build and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
- 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.