eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update
valueaddedresource.net
valueaddedresource.net
Something like “I want an old mini PC to use as a home server, it should have roughly these specs and cost under this amount”, and then an LLM would run some searches every day, parse the results and send me a message if something comes up.
It’s pretty easy to get alerts for when items are available for a certain price if you know the exact item you want, but on eBay and classifieds sites, I usually just want something in a rough ballpark, and the best way to find that is come back and check every day looking through searches.
I don’t really see any value in having the AI do the purchase itself though.
You already can do that on ebay. Whatever terms get you ballpark results can become a search alert. You don't need to know the items you want exactly. And you get a handy email with the results of that alert when they hit, which you can scroll over in about ten seconds.
Basically, you would leave your character logged in sitting at the auction house. It would observe auctions for a while, and generate pricing data and sales data. Then, you would enable automatic mode, and it would automatically bid/buy any item that someone put up for sale if the price was much lower than normal.
You would leave it running overnight, or whatever, then come back to go pick up all the items it bought, and then you would go back to the auction house and sell all your items you bought at the correct price.
Basically, you would see buy auctions created by people who didn’t realize what the correct price should be and sold too cheaply. Since this was an automated system, you could beat any human to take advantage of the deal.
I made a ton of in game currency doing this.
After a few months they changed the auction rules to prevent this… add-ons could no longer directly bid on items, and you had to sit there and click “buy” whenever the script found a good deal. This severely limited the amount you could make with the script.
Basically this mirrors the eBay timeline, with the same reasons I am guessing… eBay (like WoW) doesn’t want bots collecting arbitrage.
There are businesses doing the other way round: list a bunch of stuff, then once an order is placed find the item to fulfil it with.
> Also if this were a business and you were going to resell it the AI could also create the listing as soon as the item is purchased.
That sounds like an awful grift, but good point, people might use such a system for that.
Can't you set up a saved search that ebay will notify you of?
>“I want an old mini PC to use as a home server, it should have roughly these specs and cost under this amount”
This is a bad example because at pretty much all times, there is sufficient inventory for you to find the actual item you want, so you don't need the "agent" to repeatedly check. In instances where there is limited inventory, saved searches have been the reliable solution for decades. It's how niche youtube channels have acquired niche hardware forever.
Afterall, that's what most people would be when asked to make decisions for others without context.
Making the agent understand your requirements would be quite a bit of work.
I do think I would already get value from a least worse option every day, a sort of 'digest', so I don't have remember, and to look through results myself. I think it's a best case for LLM use for me, there is no harm at all in false negatives or positives, there are no significant stakes and I think the vagueness / unpredictability of the output is an advantage, it might find something that I had not even considered (like for my example: here is a used laptop with roughly these specs, it could also be a good home home server, something like that).
Many years ago, there was an auction site called uBid. They had the sane rule: Bidding is open as long as there have been bids in the past 5 minutes.
So the end date could be January 24th, 3pm, but if someone bids at 2:58pm, the deadline is extended to 3:05pm. And it keeps going.
You know, like how auctions in the real world work.
I've seen studies on auction method that suggest the difference in the final price (between explicit end time and the more traditional extend-until-bidding-stops method) is negligible for online auctions except in a few special cases. This is a marked difference from the expectation that, like a real-world in-person auction, the extending deadline might encourage further spur-of-the-moment bidding.
Whether it makes much difference to the final price or not is immaterial though if the buyers believe that it does. This is one of the (several) reasons why eBay won out against similar competition in the early days: buyers felt they were getting a better deal by being able to snipe so favoured eBay with more of their attention and this brought more sellers to the platform (which attracted more buyers, and so on round the loop). It is telling that to deal with the extra load imposed on the system by external bots refreshing pages and putting in automated bids, instead of switching to an extending auction model they implemented what is almost a built-in sniping feature.
Auction sites have to be very careful (or just very lucky) in their messaging, to convince both sellers and buyers that they are getting a good deal - any major change to how eBay works could upset the balance that they currently have in that regard and start a flood in the other direction (the more people leave, the more other people will think about leaving) to the building toward critical mass that was how they won out in those early days.
Did they measure the impact of people who stopped using the platform due to their bids being sniped?
eBay really seems to be the only auctioneer using the snipable process it uses.
For example, suppose the current price is $1 and the current winner is someone who bid $2 as their maximum bid ceiling. If I bid a $3 maximum, then I become the winner at a price of $2.
In this model, there is no need for snipping and those who honestly declare their maximum ceiling from the start are in no disadvantage compared to those who frequently update their bid, nor do they overpay.
Early bids make you commit to matching other bidders’ exploratory bids. You lose out on the (naive) dream of a “great deal”. Sniping (without paid-for bot assistance) is a costless way of not revealing your ceiling until the last moment (and it commits you to actually sticking to your ceiling because there isn’t time to rebid later).
If everyone bid rationally, this wouldn’t matter, but it’s very easy to convince yourself that you can stomach bidding just a little more than your ceiling just to win the item. This cuts two ways: last-minute bids prevent this behavior from others while also stopping it in yourself.
Not that this is perfect either, often it means you can push other people’s bids up to their max even though you have no intention of buying the item. I’ve seen it as a seller and felt bad for the buyers
I've never quite understood why people get so upset about sniping on eBay. Anybody can snipe. That's just the best play. Any time I want to bid on something on eBay, I just set my max bid on the sniping tool instead of on eBay, and then forget about it.
commit ecfd9009-5bae4398b13645e14ec4ce25 (HEAD -> deal-with-snipers)
Author: sunrunner
Date: Thu Jan 22 13:57:34 2026 +0000
Update BidBot default bid cents amount to be 18 (was 16), to deal with pesky sniping strategies discovered on HN.Much like your example, in the two minutes before the end of the auction, every new bid placed extends the auction clock by another two minutes, the winner hasn't won the auction until two minutes have passed with no further counter bids.
For example, think about "sniping" from the seller side. Sellers are rightly concerned about any wrinkle of the bidding process that might leave money on the table. Automatically extending the time so that every potential buyer has time to "answer" a new bid soothes the concern that buyers were willing to pay higher, but they didn't have the technological prowess to post their bid in the last 0.3 seconds.
You also have to proportionally raise the bid increment, or you'll have people bidding $1 up at the end of every 5 minute period in order to exhaust and frustrate the person they're bidding against. Their opponent's only choices are 1) to mirror the $1 raises, which could go on for ages (then sleep and automation become issues), or 2) to make a big jump hoping that they jump past their opponents limit.
In the case of 2) the dollar bidder's limit could be +$10, and there's no rational way for their opponent to choose the amount for a big jump other than jumping to their limit. Meaning that they just wipe away all of their potential bargain and get it for their valuation. Leaves a sour taste; feels like they're bidding against themselves.
As somebody who auctions things, I use a required greater than "≈10%" of the current bid amount bid increment, and the auction doesn't end on an item until there hasn't been a bid for 10 minutes. Works great. "≈10%" means to just drop the last digit of the current bid to know the minimum next bid. Then I can set the auction to end an hour before I really want it to end; if it hasn't ended by then it's because I mispriced something and the right people found it.
You capture all the value you can, and it runs completely unattended. You just need a way to timestamp bids and broadcast that timestamp e.g. a forum post.
If the winner, instead of paying what they bid, pays what the second-highest bidder bid (and bids are secret until someone exceeds them) then the incentives change. Everyone is incented to bid what it is worth to them, safely knowing (1) they won't pay more than that, (2) they will win the auction if no one outbids them, and (3) they won't pay more than necessary to win the auction.
eBay works this way (more-or-less), so you CAN (if you choose to) simply place your bid any time that is convenient and then ignore the timing of the end of the auction and all the sniping bots.
Meanwhile it's now 100% free to sell on eBay for non-professional sellers.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/help/selling/fees-credits-invoices/fe...
Before: Buyer pays £100, seller receives £100, seller later charged £5 fee, ends up with £95.
After: Buyer pays £100, eBay pockets £5 "buyer protection fee", seller receives £95 with "no fees".
In the last 5 years I've won multiple auctions for not-really-worth-shipping things like bikes, paid via Paypal, then had the buyers contact me to say the fees are too high, cancel the auction and deal separately in cash.
For anything that you're picking up in person anyway, very little reason to use ebay vs. FB marketplace.
Nice:
> You won't pay final value fees or regulatory operating fees
Of course, they will likely find some other way to extract their fees.
It would be nice, however, if the final value fee went away for US non-professional sellers.
There does seem to be no indication (at least on the page you linked) of how they define "private seller", which also opens up the possibility of them defining it so narrowly that, say, only five UK residents ever qualify.
The fear of being sniped encourages you to bid your maximum value, and not just wait and see if you can sneak in a lower bid. This is what all auction sites want.
With ubid, you also had the feature of letting it bid to your highest price. Yet they still extended the auction if someone outbid your highest price.
It works quite well!
It seems that despite repeated reminders and explanations, there are three groups of people using eBay "incorrectly" that make the sniping strategy viable: 1) People who do not understand proxy bidding and think that they "need" to repeatedly bid in increments. 2) People who are irrational about their price ceiling and are willing to bid above their price ceiling because they want to "win". 3) People who want to drive up the price either to deprive others of a good deal, or to drive up the price on behalf of the seller by starting a bidding war with the two above groups.
From a sellers perspective it is common to deal with buyers who won't pay because they paid "more than they wanted", although this is against the eBay ToS and a bid is a contract to purchase the item, because there are few consequences for not doing so.
For some reason, auctions with more bidders seem to attract more bidders, whereas auctions with zero bids seem to go unnoticed. I wonder if this has to do with eBay's search ranking algorithm or some other irrational behavior that I don't understand. At any rate, bidding with 5 or less seconds left to go seems to defeat the above behaviors. I find it distasteful and irrational but it works so I put up with it.
eBay's reputation and trust network is really what makes it a viable product at this point. Given how unreliable Facebook Marketplace buyers are and how many scams are present, I would hesitate to conduct any major transactions beyond a local area.
Huh. I'm a "buy it now" guy and filter out the auctions, but maybe I should start looking for zero bid auctions too.
You can also save searches for a fixed-priced listing below a specified value, and enable alerts, so that if someone lists something that's priced to sell, you can get it quickly.
i am looking for a bargain not a bidding war. i dont know what is my price ceiling but i know i will only increment twice. if someone outbids me instantly twice in a row i dont want the thing anymore.
Can you really say that $23 was your hard limit, or would you have paid $23.40? Unless you're buying something also available at retail, nobody can be that accurate in foresight.
Sniping removes the 'contemplation window' to reconsider your bid.
I've never really been bothered by "sniping" in eBay. I always bid my absolute 100% maximum, and if someone bids more than me, then they can have it.
Like, if I'm at a store and an item costs $500, and I bring it to the checkout and the cashier says "oh sorry that was mislabeled, it's $500.01 not $500", there is no world in which I go "okay never mind then, $500 was my max". There does not exist a situation where I've decided I want something at price $X, but would not buy it at price $X + $0.01, because $0.01 is absolutely negligible.
So where does this fantasy of an absolute max price come from?
Knowing people bid snipe by bidding one cent over whole dollars, would you consistently bid two cents over if it meant you would win more of your auctions?
One cent is negligible. If you asked me if I would have paid $10.01 instead of $10.00, I'd probably say "Sure". $10.02? $10.03? Like, where does the line get drawn?
And then you come at it from the other way. Let's say I'd pay $10, but not $11. But what about $10.50? $10.25? Or we can go down by pennies again.
I agree, put in your limit and walk away. If you get overbid, even by a cent, don't sweat it. That's the game. But I can see why people get frustrated when they lose an auction by one cent.
In fact, I'm somewhat angry at sellers setting up auctions if there's no other way to acquire a specific item. Why they won't put a minimum price they're happy to part with some items for, instead of wasting time of a lot of people by withholding target price and pretending they're earning premium through work?
Also some sellers seem to use some fake accounts to bid high on their own item, revealing your max bid, then cancel their bid, then bid right under your max bid to maximise their sell price. Happened to me twice, and now no longer setting my max bid in advance since.
The 'nibblers' will invariably show up and bid small amounts until they exceed your maximum bid, while not revealing theirs.
- bidding more than once and allowing time for others to counter bid drives up the price through competition for the item. Sniping also removes the temptation to counter bid, rather than to stick to your maximum bid.
- not sniping allows the seller to do ghost bidding, letting them discover your maximum price (including counter bidding). Here someone always out bid you (the ghost bidder) but the seller says the winner didn't complete the sale so offers it to you at your highest bid.
The only way auto-bid could hide information is if eBay treated auto bid as "silent auction" style. Show "zero bids" all the way to the end, then once closed, see which 'auto-bid' came in highest and declare that bidder the winner.
Sniping is attempting to recreate 'silent auction' style bidding, with a bid system that is not 'silent'.
Sure, I've been outbid at the last moment. Losing an auction is always a little frustrating. But if I was willing to pay that price I should have bid it myself. Feels fair enough?
Since, from the outside, it surely sounds like you get pleasure by inflicting some form of suffering on others. But that hopefully isn’t considered fun, is it?
If there was never a worry about this, they could bring out (and decide) that ceiling only after being outbid.
And this probably appears to work enough times in the snipers favor to trick them into thinking it is a winning strategy, whereas they likely would have won the same auctions in the end by just bidding that 'minimum' as their maximum bid. But as they can't easily (i.e., without expense) A/B test their strategy, they get no feedback that sniping isn't really helping them like they think it is helping them.
I can only hope.
The businesses that win will be the ones that build AI-agent-friendly interfaces, not the ones that try to ban them. eBay is protecting their ad revenue and impulse-buy funnel in the short term, but they're ceding the future to whoever figures out how to make agent-compatible commerce work.
Every product and platform will eventually have an "agent API" alongside their human UI. The only question is who builds it first.
You mean today, when web apps refuse to render to mobile browser agents, forcing redirect to mobile apps, but work fine when toggled to a desktop agent?
TikTok, Instagram, etc.
This also completely sidesteps any actions Ebay decides. It will have all credentials for them and mfa. To ebay this will look identical to the user with no real way to stop it.
I do not endorse this approach but it is well established in the tech industry.
No wonder Facebook marketplace has destroyed them
Same for a half functioning Xbox. No "normal" person would want that. But apparently, on eBay, something like a dozen people took serious interest in it, and it was sold in a few days in "parts only" condition. For sure I didn't like how much the transaction fee I paid, but at least I got rid of it for a decent amount of money.
I listed the item as $185.00 + $10.00 shipping.
Order total = $195.00
- Transaction fees = $32.44
- Postage label = $14.65
Postage I can understand.
I suspect they (eBay) do this to avoid folks listing items for $1.00 with $194.00 shipping to avoid paying eBay any fees.
That is dangerous thinking right there: Ebay does not have rights.
Of course ebay may do it anyway, and it may take time for justice to correct things, but it is not Right, nor their right, to violate law even to protect themselves.
No, that is the actual dangerous thinking. Ebay enjoys the same freedom of association that you do. Their right to not do business with you is exactly the same as your right to not do business with them. It's the very same right you exercise every time you use an add blocker.
You are incorrect about that. They are subject to the ADA. I am not.
As a publicly listed company they have a tremendous number of other laws that apply to them and not to me.
> It's the very same right you exercise every time you use an add blocker.
Exactly: As an accessibility tool, it is illegal for a company to deny service in the US (and Ebay is a US corporation, despite their Canadian roots) for the use of the tool.
If we were talking about some government-run water utility then sure, it would different, but a private online store can ban users without ruining their life, and if you're opposed to this new rule you should stop using them in protest.
> Yes they do, as they should.
No they should not, and I cannot believe you could say any such thing in good faith.
> if you're abusing their service they need to be allowed to ban you
Who said anything about "abusing their service"?
> Imagine if Amazon wasn't allowed to ban scammers
Nobody is talking about banning scammers.
Don't do this: Don't argue in bad faith. You can still disagree and think companies have the right to commit crimes, but you don't have to act like I'm saying something that I'm clearly not!
> but a private online store can ban users
Actually they can't, because we're now talking about users instead of scammers and abusers: There's something called the Americans for Disability Act, and it protects access to storefronts and no a private online store CANNOT ban users who need an accessibility tool.
ex: "...parts only", "foo for bar", ...
How likely am I to get the wrong product entirely or something that I can't actually use.
Of course this is why they ban it because the odds of you getting something wrong is too high and sellers + eBay would lose out.
I haven't followed all the appeals though, and I'm not your lawyer.
v2 I just shipped adds:
• risk scoring on drafts • policy path traces • approval chain previews • highlighted spans showing what triggered the block • admin review endpoints
The motivation is exactly what people are pointing at here: once agents can transact, marketplaces end up banning them unless there’s a way to pause, inspect, and assign responsibility at execution time.
Curious what failure modes you’d want intercepted first if eBay or Amazon ever exposed agent purchase APIs.
I've also had to return a few items for which eBay's AI-generated description was wrong in ways that couldn't be verified in the product's images. I can only imagine the increase in canceled/returned orders from all the different AI features and bots.
I imagine this type of automation existed before LLM agents came along - what do they add? Is it just the ability to evaluate the product description? Item quality is already listed as a categorical variable.
Ongoing tasks, arbitrage for mispriced postings in ways that aren't currently exploited that LLMs make feasible - by banning auto-buy, maybe they're attempting to delineate between human seeming behavior and automation, and giving AI permission to buy looks too much like a real person?
Seems pretty petty to me.
Just a random example:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/376783554515
It clearly says "Buyer pays return shipping."
I've seen enough by now and I know that some people will just unleash LLMs on anything without almost no oversight. We can already see people use agentic IDEs with "do all the shit" flag, they would probably easily add finances to the list of automation.
But, honestly, would you?
If I were going to automate something like this, I'd have a suite of products to watch for - common enough to be reasonably frequent but obscure enough to be mispriced, kinda the whole idea behind secondhand ocmmission / antique / estate sale shops.
I don't know how EBay is supposed to differentiate automation from real users in this scenario. To get around it, all you need is human intervention at the last act, so you could fire up your bot and have it forward the "buy now" link when all parameters are met? Maybe they just don't want AI companies to have an argument for some sort of revenue sharing or commissions.
On the other hand, when people list a steeply discounted item, there's usually a good reason why they do so - opportunities for easy arbitrage are rare because people would usually prefer not to give you free money if they can help it. Signing up to automatically buy broken items for $600 without so much as looking at their condition seems like an easy way to lose a lot of money.
I'm not sure how they would intend to stop it with this policy anyway. It at best is going to be an arms race detecting them. What it does do is prevent upfront the ham handed excuse of "I didn't bid on this, my bot did".
*OpenAI issues a micro auction to glass cleaner companies and distributors to see who will bid the highest combined commision*
"Sure thing! I ordered some Glass Clean Plus from Target for you!"
My mistake, you're completely correct, perhaps even more-correct than the wonderful flavor of Mococoa drink, with all-natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners!
So now imagine ten thousand of these jerks telling their AI of choice "hey go scrape everything you can and re-list it for 10% more". That's a lot of load on the platforms at both ends for listings that are unlikely to generate many sales.
The right way to use LLMs here is to have them write (and perhaps maintain) scraping scripts and run those.
Stuff that used to have to be laboriously scripted can now be pseudo code.
That said, I guess that's not quite the sort of "buy for me AI" that eBay is after here
Really, dealing with bullshit for you is by far the biggest promise of any agentic solutions today.
Web got infested by ads, I wonder BS will agents use.
"Buy good quality for less than market value and don't get scammed" is so far beyond AGI complete that I cannot fathom how people think it will be reliably doable by LLMs
I think it's telling though how everyone's example of how an AI agent can help you shop is "I want it to take advantage of someone else's mistake or knowledge asymmetry to make me free money".
Are you all just embarrassed used car salespeople?
An AI that shops for a blind user, for one free example of the untold and unexplored uses of new technology.
Data’s the only moat left. Companies like stack overflow need to build revenue streams from AI or they will cease to exist.
By banning bots and then licensing some kind of access, eBay can protect itself from merely being a listing point that no human actually visits. Tailwind and their adverts via docs model, eBay and its promoted listings model, we’re going to see businesses adapt or die on this.
Agents are being used to automate things like non-cash account balance arbitrage, stacking and abusing marketing promotions, triangulated purchasing schemes, and purchase-refund arbitrage schemes at an increasingly large scale.
If you have a well-behaved agent that uses a browser to buy on eBay, I doubt that will cause issues. But if it leads to issues, they can point to that clause instead of having to help repair the issues caused by someone else's software.
Just like faxes, the internet and the world wide web, sure, this new thing Could connect everything, but that's not nearly as much of a technical problem as a sociopolitical one. Same as it ever was.
In fact, it may just be that eBay wants to be the business selling AI "buy for me" agents.
I’m not a huge ebayer but I’m usually watching one or two auctions at a time. The problem is that you can’t disallow marketing notifications. So, if I want to be usefully alerted for a new item in a search, or that I’ve been outbid, or the imminent end of an auction, I’ll also be getting notifications and emails about all kinds of shit I don’t care about. $5 off coupons (that only apply to 8 items that I don’t want). “You might like this!” notifications (spoiler: I never do). Group buying times (who cares?).
So I either disable ALL notifications (and have an LLM write a script that crawls searches manually and much more appropriately notifies me on its own), or I enable notifications and get a bunch of trash spam.
As it relates to specifically to buying, we’ve known for a long time that we’re all up against some kind of bot that’s timed the exact last moment and amount to outbid us. It’s no fun.
I’ve been an eBay user since 1998 and it’s been on a very slow roll of enshittification since then.
Make your experience better for humans and maybe we’d be less inclined to outsource negative experiences to AI.
if it was some Bozo executive as we see at most tech companies - they would be advocating to implement the Open Agentic Commerce whatever being pushed by google while not noticing its killing their own company
My question then becomes, does this policy violate the ADA for those users in particular? UIf it doesn't today, should it tomorrow? Especially if these AI browsers actually become viable for those users. Will there be a future where if you're protected by ADA you can be cleared to use a more automated browser? I would imagine a sane rule for such an exception would require you to fully identify yourself to the website in order to prevent abuse by bots pretending to need that type of access (the good old "trust me bro" problem). Or maybe they get to use it but it becomes more rate limited to the average user speed or whatever.
Impossible to enforce, they can read browser windows and pass captchas
A charge back doesn’t mean buyer always wins. Imagine if credit card companies also pass a rule - “LLM or AI purchases are non-refundable”.
On a different note - once I tried to cancel an eBay order within a minute, both eBay and seller declined. It’s so fked up with them.
Maybe, but a policy's or law's validity or importance are not contingent on them being enforceable.
There might be lot of modelling that could be done simply based on words used in searches and behaviour of opening pages. All trivially tracked to user's logged in session.
That would be making an assumption that a device and/or account maps 1:1 to a specific human. It does not. People share accounts, share devices, and ask others for one-off help ("hey can you finish buying this for me while I deal with $[whatever our kid just did]", this kind of stuff).
Man I hate this
Marketplaces like eBay are designed to monetize 'Wandering Attention'—sponsored listings, 'customers also bought', and sidebar ads.
An AI Agent represents 'Laser Focused Attention'. It executes a transaction with zero wandering. It effectively turns the marketplace into a commoditized backend database / dumb pipe.
From a Growth/Unit Economics perspective, an AI Agent is a nightmare customer. It has zero probability of impulse buying and generates zero ad revenue. They are banning them to save their business model, not their inventory.
(Generated comments aren't allowed here - we only want commenters who write in their own voice. More explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...)
There was a business a while back that was like "pay $50-100 to carpool from SF to LA" and the post-mortem was: "your earning potential was limited, no power-seller support" b/c eventually just turn into a bus-driver/bus company. (Uber is an interesting contra-example).
It's stuck with me as a quick analysis of business-types: how does the power-seller eventually make 10x, or at least 2x median wages?
I think Uber would absolutely turn into a bus company if their risk tolerance allowed for this. It did change from "I have a car and free time" to "I'm buying a car to be a full-time Uber driver"
I mean, it's deliberately misleading, but it's not fraud. If it says "box only", it means box only.
Again, is this predatory? Yes, absolutely. But you can only prevent stupidity so many times....
[1] Given how hard eBay pushes sellers to purchase the sponsored and promoted listing tiers (at an additional fee of course) implies they make some nice revenue stream from these advertisements.
The race is already happening: open weights models are getting good enough that "your personal shopping agent" doesn't need to phone home to a company with ad incentives. The future probably looks more like ad blockers than ad platforms - agents that aggressively optimize for user preferences, not platform revenue.
The marketplace that builds "agent-friendly" commerce (verified listings, structured data, transparent pricing, API access) becomes the default backend for AI shopping. The one that bans agents becomes a legacy system humans have to manually navigate when the agent can't help.
eBay's current business model may be a "nightmare customer" for AI agents, but that's a problem with the business model, not with the agents.
I'd like to believe this, but claims like this have been made since the early days of internet commerce. After all, it's not hard to specify structured data about items and run queries against it. But it largely has not materialized outside of a few special suppliers.
You can't actually search Amazon or eBay or Wayfair for things with specified dimensions or characteristics. You can, however, find lots of listings for things like "Gzsbaby 6 Piece Jumbo Dinosaur Toys for Kids 3-5 and Toddlers, Large Soft Dinosaur Toys for Lovers - Perfect Party Favors, Birthday Gifts "
Perhaps this time is different? But why is it different? What economic incentives will lead to good structured data and transparent pricing, rather than whatever the AI equivalent of glurge/slop listings is?
It's similar to DoorDash. If your restaurant didn't want to sign up, they added you anyways and took orders on your behalf, then sent a physical courier over with a prepaid card to order takeout. Sometimes the menus were parsed incorrectly and customers blamed the restaurant.
This forced restaurants to sign up, claim their page, and keep their menus up to date, since not offering delivery wasn't an option.
At least 1 agentic AI tool will ignore these new terms and buy stuff on eBay anyways. Inevitably there'll be bugs or it won't get the best deal. At first this won't matter, but eventually competitors will offer a bug-free purchasing experience and consumers will move over.
People can do that too, and also benefit from actual structured data. But the avoidance of the chicken and egg problem didn't seem to result in widespread structured data stores beating out the SEO-spam-style listings.
If you want to be a productive member try commenting what you put into your prompt instead of the slop that comes out.
Also classic ai drivel: This is about protecting the business model, not their inventory. My brother in AI, eBay doesn't have inventory. They're a platform.
I'm also skeptical of anything that claims to reliably detect AI writing. FWIW, I plugged the comment into Pangram Labs, which claims to be the most reliably and seems to have worked well before. It categorized the comment as 100% human written with medium confidence.
Let's assume it's a bot. Is the point it's making unreasonable? Is it really unreasonable to refer to eBay's listings as inventory?
Ebay is a pretty eclectic marketplace and I can think of a number of possible reasons that have little to do with ads. For example, they may be worried about high error rates, and thus buyer and seller dissatisfaction. If I instruct an agent to buy X, eBay is almost never interchangeable with Amazon or Target.
They have no problem surfacing their listings on Google Shopping.
Given how hard they push sellers to purchase their "extra cost listing enhancements" (i.e., purchase to have your listings show in the "advertisement" spots) it appears that they may make a decent revenue stream from these advertising angles. An AI-agent could find listings without going through the advertising displays and as such cut into this revenue stream.
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