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eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

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Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#181

Post by [deleted] »

mort96 wrote: post #171
less_less wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not supposed to be some red line absolute max price, but rather "how much is this item worth to you?" You set that as your max bid price. If you get it at auction for less than that, you got a good deal, but if you buy it for more, you got a bad deal. If someone outbids you, then maybe it was worth it to them, but you (supposedly) would not have wanted to buy the item for that much, and would rather use your mon…

The logic of "you shouldn't ever need to snipe, just bid your max price" only works if we assume that the max price is a red line though. If I "value something" at $5000 (as in I want to buy it at $5000), and I bid $5000, and someone bids $5000.01, I would probably be happy if I sniped them and got the item for $5000.02.

[deleted]

Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#182

Post by cheschire »

MarginalGainz wrote: post #180

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 G…

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

Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#183

Post by delaminator »

qznc wrote: post #163

Is my primary user agent, my web browser, still allowed? /s

Maybe if you'd actually read the agreement

> In connection with using or accessing our Services you agree to comply with this User Agreement, our policies, our terms, and all applicable laws, rules, and regulations, and you will not...

> use any robot, spider, scraper, data mining tools, data gathering and extraction tools, or other automated means (including, without limitation buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end flow that *attempts to place orders without human review*) to access our Services for any purpose, except with the prior express permission of eBay;

Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#184

Post by superultra »

This is a case where it may be that people are outsourcing shitty user experiences to an AI.

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.

Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#185

Post by j16sdiz »

__jonas wrote: post #166

Interesting, I’m not big on AI but I have thought often it would be nice to have an ‘agent’ that monitors ebay or other classifieds sites for items based on a natural language description. 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…

I would expect a naive implementation would give you a "least worse" option everyday and can't judge when it is "good enough"

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.

Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#186

Post by maccam912 »

__jonas wrote: post #166

Interesting, I’m not big on AI but I have thought often it would be nice to have an ‘agent’ that monitors ebay or other classifieds sites for items based on a natural language description. 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…

I essentially do this but on a state surplus auctions site. It's just a scheduled action which searches for something, e.g. old Lego kits, once a week. Usually nothing comes up but at least once there are kits I know about it.

Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#187

Post by jasonjayr »

cornholio wrote: post #159
cge wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, most purely online auctions, other than eBay, do work that way. Numerous auction houses, for example, including essentially all the major ones, have their auctions online now: when they are hybrid, that involves online live bidding where an online bid will cause the auctioneer in the room to keep the lot open for more bids; when they are "timed" or "online only", times are extended in some way on bi…

An alternative to ever extending the deadline is a Dutch auction model, where a bid consists of the maximum price you are willing to pay. It's a bit like integrating the snipping bot in eBay and allowing everyone to use it on fair terms. 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…

Ebay works like this too. But because sniping is still permitted, I like to bid 'uncommon' amounts, like $3.17, so if someone else tried to bid a max of $3.00 even at the last moment, the bid for the few cents more wins.

Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#188

Post by aunty_helen »

Can’t charge for something if you’re giving it away for free.

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.

Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#189

Post by Retr0id »

muvlon wrote: post #132
gond wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question: what kind of fun you are referring to here? 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?

I don't think this is inflicting net suffering, really. The money doesn't just disappear, the seller gets it. Auctions are zero-sum.

They're not zero-sum on ebay because ebay takes a percentage cut

Re: eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update

#190

Post by cucumber3732842 »

subroutine wrote: post #79
cucumber3732842 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drop shippers who arbitrage between major and minor ecommerce platforms need to maintain their listings, re-price things, etc. They don't care if the AI gets it wrong sometimes as long as they more than make back the cost of deploying it. 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 e…

But that also seems like a very inefficient way to accomplish this automation task from the drop shippers side too. What do you gain from the LLM that non LLM automation couldn't do more cost effectively?

The LLMs are being used to hack around the fact that while the software mostly works for what people need any given user inevitably has a few workflows that are clunky or highly manual.

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

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