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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

#221

Post by pjc50 »

darkxanthos wrote: post #177
__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…

The purchasing itself can important for it to jump on a great price. Maybe it finds what you're looking for at 1a while you're sleeping for example. 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.

> the AI could also create the listing as soon as the item is purchased.

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.

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

#222

Post by pjc50 »

andrew_lettuce wrote: post #205
the_gastropod wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#223

Post by pjc50 »

pwg wrote: post #87
dankwizard wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, 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.

And, at least in the US, eBay charges their "final value fee" percentage on the order total (the sale price plus the shipping price paid by the buyer). So if the item has a 3% final value fee (the percentages differ across different categories of listings) then Ebay got $0.44 of additional fee from your $14.65 of shipping you paid to the shipping service. And there is no option to obtain a rebate on actual shipping p…

People definitely used to do that, yes.

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

#225

Post by Twixes »

malfist wrote: post #215
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…

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.

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

#226

Post by ramses0 »

pjc50 wrote: post #222
andrew_lettuce wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

#227

Post by imtringued »

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.

By your logic, there is no such thing as a limit or maximum bid. It's like you don't understand the concept of a maximum.

If you're always willing to add one more cent then that wasn't your maximum.

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

#228

Post by imtringued »

mort96 wrote: post #203
less_less wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not defending "you shouldn't ever need to snipe, just bid your max price" as a hard principle, just trying to explain where the idea comes from. Sniping can be strategic for lots of reasons: you don't have to commit to a bid until the last second (in case you find a similar item for cheaper elsewhere), you deny other people information, you might avoid anxiety from wondering whether your bid will win, etc. That s…

> But if you set a max price at $5000 and would be happy to get the item at $5000.02 (for some reason other than satisfaction from sniping), then you set your max price wrong, or at least differently from how economists expect you to set it. I think this is the problem. When most sciences observe reality diverge from the model, they see that as a flaw in the model. When economists (at least you HN "economists") obser…

According to you, a bidder should always be willing to extend the bid to infinity since each increment is only one cent more.

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

#229

Post by mort96 »

retsibsi wrote: post #217
mort96 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> are you > - agreeing there must be some threshold such that if the price is $X then you will buy(/bid on) the item, but if the price is $X + $0.01 then you won't; No, I'm not. If I will buy an item for price $X, I will buy the item for the price $X + $.01. The decision to purchase something is more complex and cannot be encapsulated as one single dollar value. I think something your model fails to account for is: t…

> If I've already gone through a lot of the process to decide to buy something at a certain price [...] then I've already spent some not-insignificant amount of resources on the purchasing process. Yes, that's part of what I was trying to account for with my second bullet point. But before you've made that initial decision, there must be some price that would cause you to make it a 'yes' and some marginally higher pr…

Before I have made that initial decision, and before I have invested resources into evaluating what I think the value of a product is, I do not have a price in mind. Deciding on a price I think is fair for a product takes effort. The more accurately I want to determine it, the more effort it is.

Could there exist some hypothetical subjective value? I mean maybe. But not one that I have knowledge of, so it's not something that can even hypothetically affect my behavior. The only time at which I could possibly be aware of my own subjective value judgement of a product necessarily has to be after I have invested time to evaluate it.

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

#230

Post by the_arun »

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…

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.
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