eBay updates legalese to ban AI-powered shop-bots

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 ...