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Comment by MarginalGainz | Hacker News Reader

This ban isn't about 'fairness' or bot protection; it's about protecting the Impression Funnel.

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.

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I suspect they might lose money on returns too, which are probably more likely if an AI misunderstands what the buyer wants or misjudges quality or can’t detect fake listings etc

I don’t know if there are other ways eBay could lose money on returns. But my single data point: the very first thing I sold on eBay (a manual lever espresso machine) got returned because the buyer clearly didn’t know how to use it, and claimed it was defective. And because eBay has a money back guarantee, they just reached their hands into my back account and withdrew the earnings from the sale + the shipping costs for the delivery to the buyer + the shipping fees for the return. They even kept their listing fee and the sales tax. So… I don’t think eBay stands to lose money directly from returns. Maybe they risk pissing too many sellers off with an increased rate of this horrific experience?!

eBay needs to focus attention, efforts and resources on this if it's an increasing problem so the alternative uses for those resources is a cost. If sellers like you get mad and don't list that costs them too.

Like etsy, they long since worked out that most volume is through dropshippers of products mass produced in China. Or a few physical businesses like houseclearers which can manage a high throughput. If you're a random private seller with a single item, you're an inconvenience to them.

"Power Sellers" - there was a statement that your business (for marketplace-type-business) needed to have an avenue to support "mega" suppliers for eventual symbiotic success.

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?

Thinking a bit more, it would be quite handy to have a "power seller" AI for all my random junk. Spread it out on a table, pan a camera over it, then leave it to the computers until someone's willing to pay an amount for one of those objects that's worth the work of packing and shipping it.

This is a really cool idea. A sort of table where you just leave the stuff that you want to sell. There could be a dedicated tablet / computer where to interact with the AI (adjust prices, receive orders) and a little printer to print the shipping labels.

Until that AI can take the item, take photos, describe the item properly, drop it off a post office - I assure you, dedicated AI will only slow you down.

> 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).

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"

[flagged]

I don't think it's Etsy fault other than allowing it. If someone is selling artisanal wooden cutting boards, someone will see it and think how they can do the same-ish, but with less overhead. Someone will also make "How I make money of etsy" video and sell their courses, probably to double-dip.

Anecdotally, I see a lot of small sellers using FB marketplace. Those are cash/venmo type deals done in person. That might just be because I live in a big enough metro area to support that.

It's about a difference of degrees. If experiences like yours happen very rarely ebay is fine with it but if it become too common then sellers will leave which is obviously a huge loss for ebay.

I only sell stuff on EBay as-is, no returns. I'm not sure if this protects me from their money back guarantee, but it gives me a little peace of mind until I too get bitten.

IANAL: but if a seller misrepresents what they’re selling then “As is” doesn’t help them. If I sell you a Ferrari “as is” but I send you a kit car that looks like a Ferrari, “as is” ain’t gonna help.

Yep. Therein lies the rub. eBay inserts themselves as the middle-man here. But they take 0 responsibility for assessing disputes if a buyer claims an item was not as described. They just arbitrarily refund buyers, and automatically pay for the shipping fees from the sellers' connected bank accounts. To make matters worse, as a seller, as far as I know, you can't limit how much the buyer can spend on shipping. So, e.g., if someone on the other side of the planet buys something from you, pays for shipping, then says "item not as described", you're going to be on the hook for a large sum. I guess this happens rarely enough for most big sellers that it's worth continuing to use ebay. But for average schmo use-cases (like selling old household goods), it's a ridiculous risk.

It doesn't hurt to add it....but it doesn't help as it's happened to me.

Selling as is helps a bit but it only covers regret returns. If the item is not as listed such as claiming to be new but the packing is opened, you're still obligated to accept a return

My listing was as-is, no returns. Didn’t matter. And I tried challenging it. Recorded a video where I opened the returned machine, assembled it, and pulled a perfect shot of espresso. Based on my server’s access logs, nobody at eBay even viewed the video. Whole experience cost me over $200 in shipping fees. Horrible experience.

Did you sue them?

Over $200? No. I filed a complaint with the BBB, but that’s as far as I took it.

That stinks! I feel very lucky now that I've gotten away scot-free.

"Mint condition MacBook Pro M5, 64GB RAM, 2TB storage, midnight black, box only" and it sells for $1800 because someone didn't see "box only".

... Is fraud.

it is?

I mean, it's deliberately misleading, but it's not fraud. If it says "box only", it means box only.

The judge and jury aren't stupid. A legitimate auction for a box would be very upfront about the box and would not start the description identically to one for a laptop.

I mean, if the words "box only" are in the product descriptor, then it's on the consumer to read the descriptor...especially if they are going to drop a few grand on something. And doubly especially if a product looks vastly under priced in comparison to buying the same item brand new from the manufacturer.

Again, is this predatory? Yes, absolutely. But you can only prevent stupidity so many times....

The judge and jury aren't stupid.

That's absolutely the intent, yes.

Another reason I could think of is Security. There is a bunch of cheating goes on there. As a seller I lost my laptop to a scammer. Seller paid be until I shipped & cancelled the transaction. Buyer asked me ship it to their son’s address. Since I didn’t use buyer’s address registered in their eBay account eBay/Paypal didn’t pay me either. AI accelerates these scams.

Or probably even wrose, it actually shifts the attention and the wandering. That phase will happen inside the LLM, where the LLM decides which link to suggest, i.e. whoever pays the LLM the most. And worse yet, that will apply not just for products, but for platforms, so if amazon pays chatgpt more than ebay does, there goes your sale.

Open source models can short circuit that hopefully.

Or if eBay blocks ChatGPT while Amazon doesn't.

The same amazon that sued anthropic for their AI trying to order stuff on Amazon?

This assumes the LLM ecosystem stays centralized. Open source models running locally or on user-controlled infrastructure flip this - the agent works for you, not for whoever pays the model provider.

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.

An AI-Agent browsing eBay for a "widget" for a given individual will also likely not be browsing eBay's advertising listings (sponsored and promoted listings [1]) which would potentially equate to a loss in ad revenue for eBay. So there is likely a "protect the advertising moat" aspect to their "ban" as well.

[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.

Nilay Patel is calling this "the DoorDash problem" and has written an essay on it here: https://www.theverge.com/podcast/823909/the-doordash-problem...

Fewer companies get the chance to enshittify my experience? Sign me up!

Right, but I suppose one issue is that, depending on how concentrated the AI agent market becomes, the rent seeking could eventually potentially just shift to these agents instead.

I'd say it mostly has to do with limiting their own liability and reputational damage if an AI bot "hallucinates" and places hundreds of incorrect orders and sellers get hit with negative ratings and refund requests due to no fault of their own.

Stated more cynically, many platforms have an interest in attention hijacking. Done well, agents' 'laser focused attention' could help users avoid wasting time (wandering attention) and money (impulse buys). This is a good thing, even if it dings revenue of some existing platforms. If a company's business model is impulse buying and ad revenue (this isn't eBay IMO), then good riddance.

Great analysis of the real motivation here. But this feels like the record labels trying to ban MP3 players. You can protect the impression funnel today, but the trajectory is clear - consumers will increasingly delegate purchasing decisions to agents, and the platforms that adapt will capture that flow.

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.

>The marketplace that builds "agent-friendly" commerce (verified listings, structured data, transparent pricing, API access) becomes the default backend for AI shopping.

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?

Because agentic AI can parse unstructured data and make purchasing decisions regardless of whether your site allows it, which avoids the chicken-and-egg problem.

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.

>Because agentic AI can parse unstructured data and make purchasing decisions regardless of whether your site allows it, which avoids the chicken-and-egg problem.

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.

I don't think the 'wandering attention' dissapears, rather it is pushed to the LLM product. It's more of a competitive transfer from the incumbent product category to the new one, it's not that the new product category 'fixes' the 'problem'

If I am able to find what I’m looking for and purchase it via AI why must I be subjected to advertising & promotion of items in have zero interest in? Amazon has made finding what I want painful. I suspect eBay is just as painful (I see to work there).

—It's not X, it's Y?

Comment definitely reads like AI

Stop the ai witch hunt madness

This reply has hallmarks of AI slop. Green name, 2x its not X its Y, em dashes.

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.

This slop so annoying to see, and tiring – but worth it here – to call out.

Dead Internet theory

I didn't catch that on first read, but I see why you'd say that. LLMs are ridiculous in the constant usage "it's not X it's Y" -- It's in almost every response from Opus 4.5. "It's not X it's Y" is ruined for regular writing.

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.

Hallmarks of AI or AI slop? Or are you suggesting that AI is slop by definition?

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?

100%.

What does green name signify on HN? I've always wondered.

New account, sub 400 karma, less than 30 days old iirc.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments

Yeah, it really says something about the state of HN these days that this account racked up (net) 261 votes in nine days writing absolute drivel.

Why not share your own thoughts rather than this LLM slop? Or maybe this is just a bot account. Either way, disappointing to see on HN.

The bots are learning to defend themselves on social media

Seriously, how is this the top comment?

That's a cynical take, so it will probably get upvoted, but what are you basing it on?

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.

But, ads directly correspond to revenue stream, and a loss of ad "impressions" would result in a reduced revenue stream, so a "protect the advertising" response is not at all unusual to consider as a portion of their (eBay's) reasoning for this ban.

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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