[jervant]

There are also things on eBay with a starting price of less than a dollar with free shipping that never get bids. I "won" two auctions like this the other week for brand new USB-C cables, each of them costing me 13 cents shipped.

I have no idea why sellers would do this with eBay fees and USPS small package shipping costing well over 13 cents.

[crazygringo]

Presumably they are inexperienced sellers who haven't learned about reserve prices?

Now you're part of their education.

Or... they are sophisticated and trying to get a ton of relatively inexpensive positive ratings before selling things that are actually expensive?

[qingcharles]

I did this on a mass scale. There are auction items that close at 1 cent with free shipping, so I signed up for the eBay API and wrote a bot to scrape all the auctions and bid one cent on them a minute before they closed.

I ended up with an enormous overflowing mountain of packages every day for weeks. I might have gone crazier, but there was a serious bug in eBay's checkout. Try checking out with 400 items in your cart. It really gets upset.

99% of the packages were Chinese sellers but the packages all came from Mongolia, so there must be some sort of postal arbitrage going on there.

It was all random stuff. Hairclips, 500 bicycle lamps. Dozens of tubes of ICs of every flavor. Crazy times.

[tempestn]

What did you do with all the random stuff?

[qingcharles]

I was mostly handing it out to anyone and everyone that wanted any. Someone left a space heater on and burned the entire building down, so I lost everything in the end. I kept debating about whether to take it further and just go nuts and order a million items, but while it was "lulzy" as hell, it was also pretty wasteful.