Hello. We just started encountering this rate limit, "Sniper: Bid Not Placed. The limit of 20 snipes per minute per user has been reached."

It's because we're setting so many bids to this user: "probstein". He has like 100 auctions ending at the same time, but when we hit 20, our bids start getting rejected. Is there a way we can spread them out or work around it? Thanks!

Hello Dax,

Thank you for your question about this message. Yes, it's common for sellers to bulk list everything at prime time, around 7pm eBay time. We had to put in a "cap" that prevented, for example, 100 snipers to bid on 100 items in the same minute. That is 10K snipes, and so we wanted a safeguard to prevent a situation where we couldn't guarantee the accuracy.

Was this a one time thing, or are you seeing it daily?

Also - if I recall, you are using the API, correct?

We're seeing it a lot now because the seller we get from is starting to list a lot of great cards. Is it possible for our bids to kick in at at earlier time to get through? Or for us to pay extra to get a higher cap? Thanks!

Anything within reason is possible. The main thing is for the sniper to be prevented from a situation it can't handle. It's possible to change the limit for one user, but we'd have to program that in for you.

I could put you on your own system (server), but would have to calculate cost. Some of our competitors have a 1.0 - 1.5 % fee for that based on closing auction price, but that would cost thousands a month (I calculated $4,800), and we don't want to blindside you, naturally.

Two questions, then,
1. What would the upper limit be? 50? 100?
2. What would be a fair price for you to pay to put you on your own server?

Sure, totally understand. Could we pay $75/month for a separate server? Not really sure of the costs. We could get by with 50! It just happens on Sundays

How about $120/month, it would be a second subscription cost ... but you get your own server (verified by snapshot) and we can guarantee 100/minute.

Also, terms include one serious rear-kicking in my Street Fighter II in my garage.

It's a big deal for us. You've helped us already a lot. We rewrote our software to accommodate you for $2/month, and been gosh dang happy to do it, as you helped us understand what is called a "max use case" and helped us improve the API.

That said, we do plan to one day soon expand and take on these $5K/momth customers, and what I proposed would be "fixed" in cost for 20 years.

Let's do it! Happy to be the guinea pig for your expansion :)

Haha, no, not guinea pig. We have helpers for testing. :D

I spoke too soon though. I've looked into this more, and we'd really need two servers with a lot of RAM to handle all of the open database connections. If you want to go to $220 a month I can get it to 100 for you. It could sustain that for the duration of prime time. Possibly it could go past that, but I'd like to run it for a month at 100.

Let me know if you want the 100 option or stick with 50.

sounds good! even 100 would help :)

On second thought, I think 50 would be okay for now. Let's see if we start getting the same error.

Thank you!

Ok - PayPal subscriptions are tricky because we’d have to cancel and resubscribe to change anything. I can set it to 50 for this coming Sunday—if that works, I’ll send that subscription. If not, I can send the other option.

How does that sound?

That works! Thank you.

Sounds good. So I have you set up. But I have a question. I have two parameters, self-explanatory:

SNIPES_MAX_PER_SECOND_PER_USER=15
SNIPES_MAX_PER_MINUTE_PER_USER=20

I changed them to 25 and 50 respectively. So the big question is, is this fella listing them all at the same --second--? Or just in the same minute?

Also, thinking outside the box, this seller is likely using a listing service and could potentially “stagger” their listings if they knew it would yield higher results from you.

Thanks! Let's see. I think it's more spread out than every second...

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_dkr=1&iconV2Request=true&_blrs=recall_filtering&_ssn=probstein123&store_cat=0&store_name=probstein123&_oac=1&_nkw=pokemon

I will also reach out and ask him to stagger more.

Thank you!

Hi, just checking in. How did it go with the '50' setting?

We're getting a new rate limit now
"the limite of 250 snipes per hour has been reached"

Can that be removed? And is it possible to use your API for BUY IT NOWs?

That's the default limit. I was waiting to hear back about how the upgrade to 50 per minute went for you. (It was a hotfix I had made for you, but it defaulted back on the next release.) If the 50 setting works ok, let me know and I can send the monthly invoice. If you need another week, that's ok also.

For Buy-It-Now, sniping should work if there are zero bids, but it depends. Here is our help page for that:

https://bidslammer.com/help/can-i-snipe-buy-it-now

That should probably be rewritten as "sniping MAY not work". If you find that it works, please let me know and I can update the help page :)

50 worked very well, thank you. Can we get a raise of the 250/hour limit? That seems a bit like overkill compared to 50/min haha.

I'll check out the buy it now. Thanks!

Yes, of course, the 50-per-minute should override the hourly.

Just in case: What is a good hourly limit? Would you mind taking a peek at that guy's auctions and we can set a cap? This is strictly a security-related question, in case someone hacks your API key or something.

Yes and please do let me know how it goes on the BIN. The main thing is, eBay protects you from overbidding on a BIN, so it blocks bids over the price.

What is a good per hour cap? I'm not sure. Maybe 500? I think he was right on the edge of 250

I set it to 350, if you need more please don't hesitate to ask. I changed the per-minute for you back to 50, you should be good to go.

I'll send the recurring invoice when I have a spare moment, it will come over as a PayPal invite.

Thanks. Can you also raise the SNIPES_MAX_PER_SECOND_PER_USER back to 25? We're hitting the 15 limit again

This is done. Thanks for the reminder. :)

Ok, I've been monitoring and satisfied it's solid. Here is a link to the PayPal payment we agreed on. This will run in parallel to your other subscription.

https://bidslammer.com/samuraituom-paypal.php

Please let me know if you have any questions.