Monday, January 2, 2017

Relaunched eBay Sniper. More listings, more reliable, and more photos

We're relaunching our free eBay Sniper for the new year.

There are more deals (2,000+ every day), photos for every deal, improved desktop notifications, and more consistent connections.

Our eBay Sniper monitors new listings on eBay. If a game is listed at a price below the market value, we post it to the Sniper. You just keep the page open and new deals show up every few minutes.

You can customize the sniper just for you:

Filter the results to only show deals for certain consoles
See buy it now and/or auctions ending soon
Customize the minimum deal threshold



Setup desktop notifications so you can continue with your day and see a little pop-up when new deals arrive


In the backend, we improved the way we pushed the changed to each user. The old sniper used to have lots of disconnection errors, but this has been fixed now. You should be able to open the tool once, continue with your normal work and then click on any notifications that interest you.

Try out the eBay Sniper and give us your feedback in the comments below and let us know what deals you find.

5 comments :

Anonymous said...

Can you add Paypal integration to your market already?

Shadowmoses said...

I love the idea of the sniper in theory and have been messing around with the relaunched version for a few days now, but there are a couple of things which hold it back in my opinion, some of which are inherent to sniping and some of which could hopefully be improved upon.

Stuff like title or condition mismatches, for instance, are unavoidable given the nature of sniping. However, a potentially bigger issue I've noticed is often times when I get a "hit" matching my filters, it is for a rarer title which has only sold a few copies within the last year. Whether it's because the title is truly rare or due to a lack of sales picked up by the site, the prices for these games are not very reliable by default and, as such, these "deals" aren't really deals 99% of the time, thus weakening the overall effectiveness of the tool. If there were a way to filter by rarity (common, rare, etc), I would think this could help to somewhat alleviate the problem. Also, the option to toggle sound for the desktop notifications would be nice.

Regardless, it's a cool little tool to have available and I appreciate it being offered. Keep up the great work.

JJ said...

@anonmymous - We are working on Paypal integration.

@Shadowmoses - Thanks for this feedback. We always working to make improvements on all aspects of the sniper (and the rest of the site). We want to reduce the number of false matches. And we also want to improve pricing on the rare titles so good deals are in fact good deals.

Can you give me an example of a listing where the price was wrong so the "deal" was wrong?

I'll make a note about setting a maximum price to consider in the filters. For example you would choose $100, and only deals below $100 would show up.

I've made a feature request for this so people can vote on it and let us know which features they want the most.

Alex said...

I noticed that a lot of the prices for listings that are title-only (no condition descriptors) now default to CIB instead of loose. This is especially problematic for NES games where the majority of listings are cartridge only.

An example of what @Shadowmoses means are games like Mario Paint or Super Scope where they really only ever sell if they include their peripherals. So the completed "loose" history of Mario Paint says it has sold for $12-16 (with mouse) but a cartridge only Mario Paint is not worth that price. And it's a bit hard to filter in a case like that. Is is an example of a title that really only sells when it is complete or new and otherwise doesn't sell at all, so the Pricecharting tracking is a little skewed as a result.

JJ said...

@Alex - We do default to CIB instead of Loose on disc based modern consoles. PS4, WiiU, PS3, Xbox 360, etc. The vast majority of those listings without condition descriptors are CIB instead of Loose.

For cartridge games, like NES, we haven't changed anything for the condition default. They still default to Loose unless the title says otherwise.

If you see an NES listing that defaults to the wrong condition, please let me know so I can look into it and address that.

Regarding peripheral games. Those are tough ones. They can definitely be skewed and the prices are highly volatile because the value changes so much between game only and game and peripheral only. I'll think about this some more and see if we can come up with a good solution for those.

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