Sniping tools are suffering again, following on from the impact last month of eBay's Weak Passwords Policy.

Mario Vodopivec of Gixen traces the problem to the new Paperless Payments Policy. This requires sellers on eBay.com to accept only paperless payments (PayPal or credit cards), causing auctions from outside the US which don't accept PayPal to be mssing from the US eBay site - the site many sniping services use to get item details and place bids.

Mario explains "On October 27th eBay broke most sniping services and software when it started restricting some items to be viewed only on their respective eBay country sites. German customers seem to be the most affected. This happens because most sniping services work with ebay.com only; so if a listing is visible only on ebay.de, most sniping services won't work with it."

A number of sniping services, including Gixen, have since released fixes for the problem.