The news: Ebay updated its user agreement to ban unauthorized AI agents from making purchases on shoppers’ behalf. The change was first reported by Value Added Resource.
The details: The new guidelines go into effect on February 20.
- They explicitly prohibit the use of any “robot, spider, scraper, data mining tools, data gathering and extraction tools, or any other automated means” to access eBay services without permission.
- The policy specifically calls out “buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, and end-to-end flows” that try to place orders without human review.
- That presumably excludes ChatGPT—which eBay has partnered with to trial its Operator agent—but does apply to agentic shopping tools from Amazon, Perplexity, and others.
Why it matters: Ebay’s push to restrict agentic shopping activity on its marketplace reflects retailers’ ambivalence toward the technology. On the one hand, companies need to be prepared to sell via AI platforms as more consumers turn to tools like ChatGPT and Gemini for advice and product recommendations. On the other hand, such platforms threaten retailers’ ability to build relationships with their customers—and to make money from advertising.
By limiting unauthorized agentic activity, eBay is following a similar path to Amazon. Like the retailer, eBay is hoping to steer users to its own agentic tools, including an AI shopping agent it is currently piloting. Unlike Amazon, eBay is open to partnering with third-party agents to offer shoppers more personalized and compelling experiences—albeit on its own terms.
Implications for retailers: Retailers need to prepare for a future in which agents shop on customers’ behalf, but they also need to establish safeguards to keep third-party platforms from usurping their relationships with shoppers. Updating robots.txt files and user guidelines is an easy first step—but enforcing those rules could be difficult.
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