eBay has decided to ban agentic shopping bots from its digital tat bazaar.
The company’s decision emerged in an update to its user agreement posted on January 20th, which insists users must not use “buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end flow that attempts to place orders without human review” on the site, unless eBay grants approval.
The revised agreement, and eBay’s previous legalese, prohibit use of “any robot, spider, scraper, data mining tools, data gathering and extraction tools, or other automated means to access our Services for any purpose.”
Advocates for agentic commerce imagine a world in which shoppers can tell an autonomous agent what they want to buy and authorize the software to purchase it on their behalf.
Some envisage simple “Buy product X when it’s available anywhere for $Y” bots. Others, like management consultancy McKinsey, think we’re headed for “a world in which AI anticipates consumer needs, navigates shopping options, negotiates deals, and executes transactions, all in alignment with human intent yet acting independently via multistep chains of actions enabled by reasoning models.”
The common denominator in those visions is that people stop visiting websites and therefore won’t see any of the extra offers publishers use to boost their sales or engagement. Site operators will instead have to contend with bots programmed to never buy metaphorical fries with that, and which incessantly stress servers in search of a deal. E-commerce outfits would therefore need to add a machine-to-machine interface in addition to their human interfaces.
Google has volunteered to provide the machine-to-machine layer, and told The Register it doesn’t envisage taking a cut of sales it facilitates. The company is, however, uncannily good at making itself an unavoidable player in markets it enters and then monetizing its dominance.
Amazon.com has already expressed its displeasure with this vision by sending agentic AI company Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter that essentially says “This establishment does not serve shop-bots.”
Google, however, says retailers appreciate the agentic commerce tools it launched a couple of weeks ago.
eBay has an obvious reason to dislike AI shoppers: It charges sellers a variable “final value fee”, which sees it earn more money on higher-priced items. Bots swooping in to win auctions on the site could mean more items sell for less, costing eBay cash.
We’ve asked eBay for comment and will update this story if the company responds. ®
