Tuesday, January 25 2005 @ 11:00 PM EST Contributed by: glosser
The NewsForge brings us information on an open source program that helps get those last second bids in on eBay items.
Have you ever bid in on eBay auction item and thought you were going to win, only to see it go at the very last second for a bid just slightly higher than yours? Congratulations, you've been sniped. Luckily, you can fight back by getting your own sniping tool, courtesy of the open source community, which provides JBidwatcher, one of the best ones gunning.
Most eBay bidders make use of eBay's proxy bidding feature that allows the bidder to set the maximum price they are willing to pay. With the proxy system eBay automatically bids on the bidder's behalf so that the high bidder position is maintained until another bidder exceeds the bidder's specified top price. Sniping means putting in a topping bid as close to the end of the auction as possible, so that no other bidder can come in and beat you. You can do it manually, but its unlikely you'll be as accurate as an automated program like JBidwatcher.
JBidwatcher is a Java-based tool that does more than just place your bid in the final moments of an auction. JBidwatcher also provides auction tracking and other bidding tools, for greater control that what is available with eBay alone.
The program is licensed under the Lesser GPL (LGPL), and as such is freely available. All you need to have is a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) and the available binary (in .jar format), which will run on either Linux or Windows. Of course you need to have an eBay account in good standing as well.
