Personal
eBay Sniper Bot
A narrowly scoped eBay bid-confirmation tool that prepares the browser interaction in advance and triggers it at a user-supplied time, with timing limited by the local clock and page state.
Auction sniping means bidding late enough that nobody has time to respond. This automates exactly the last step of that and nothing else: a human opens the browser, logs in, finds the auction and types the maximum bid, then stops at the confirmation button and hands over.
- Scope
- One click, at a time the user types
- Stack
- Python · DrissionPage · Chromium
- Repository
- VincenzoImp/ebay-sniper-bot
What it is
It does not watch the auction. It never reads the listing, the current price or the closing time. It watches the local system clock against a time the user enters, conventionally one second before the auction ends.
The one interesting line runs before the wait: the mouse is moved onto the confirmation button and the resulting action object is held. Element lookup and cursor travel are paid in advance, so when the moment arrives the only remaining work is the click itself. The wait is then a bare busy loop with no sleep, spinning to get sub-second resolution out of a second-resolution comparison.
Credentials are deliberately absent. There is no login code, no cookie handling and no stored session in the repository because the human handles authentication in the browser.
What I took from it
Everything precise about it is precise for one reason: the expensive work was moved out of the critical path. Everything fragile about it comes from what it does not know: a single hardcoded CSS selector, a target with a time but no date, no confirmation that the click landed, and accuracy bounded entirely by whether the local clock agrees with eBay’s. It is a small, honest demonstration that latency work is mostly deciding what to do early.