I never understood why eBay set things up to enable sniping.

Many years ago, there was an auction site called uBid. They had the sane rule: Bidding is open as long as there have been bids in the past 5 minutes.

So the end date could be January 24th, 3pm, but if someone bids at 2:58pm, the deadline is extended to 3:05pm. And it keeps going.

You know, like how auctions in the real world work.

What's the point of sniping bots when eBay has automatic bidding? Counter-sniping is essentially built-in, if your price ceiling is higher then a snipers then you're guaranteed to win even if they bid at the last millisecond.

Buy for me bots results in more returns, cancellations, item not as described and other problems ebay and sellers have to deal with

I've bought hundreds of things on ebay over the years and I've never understood the issue with "sniping".

Sure, I've been outbid at the last moment. Losing an auction is always a little frustrating. But if I was willing to pay that price I should have bid it myself. Feels fair enough?

I think AI is going to level the playing field with all these bots that have been used for things like this (including scalpers for those low supply/high demand items), and retailers will (hopefully) have no choice but to address the issue once everyone starts to use/abuse them.

I can only hope.

sniping bots keep people on ebay.com

This was my thought as well, sniping bots have been around for as long as ebay has. Perhaps though, the sniping bots don't cause as much load on ebay's infrastructure?

Scraping and buy for me bots cut out eBay. Sniping bots don't.