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

Post by pwg » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC

nospice wrote: post #276

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…

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…

Post by Ir0nMan » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 4:35 PM UTC

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…

Post by Terretta » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 6:43 PM UTC

asdff wrote: post #313

__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…

>eBay and classifieds sites, I usually just want something in a rough ballpark, and the best way to find that is come back and check every day looking through searches. You already can do that on ebay. Whatever terms get you ballpark results can become a search alert. You don't need to know the items you want exactly. And you get a handy email with the results of that alert when they hit, which you can scroll over in…

Post by g947o » Sat, Jan 24, 2026, 12:53 PM UTC

hattmall wrote: post #339

g947o wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have decent tech company salary but I don't even buy $10 books without checking everything. This week I almost bought a wrong book (manually) because how similar the title is. Automating stuff with AI is interesting, but I don't want the hassle of getting surprised and handling returns, if the item can be returned at all, especially on eBay.

eBay has free postage paid returns for any item, at least in the US.

Post by ahahs » Sun, Jan 25, 2026, 6:28 AM UTC

Terretta wrote: post #355

asdff wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>eBay and classifieds sites, I usually just want something in a rough ballpark, and the best way to find that is come back and check every day looking through searches. You already can do that on ebay. Whatever terms get you ballpark results can become a search alert. You don't need to know the items you want exactly. And you get a handy email with the results of that alert when they hit, which you can scroll over in…

Sure, sure, and next you'll tell me there's a way to know which side of the car the gas cap is on.