eBay has decided to ban agentic shopping bots from its digital tat bazaar.<\/p>\n
The company\u2019s decision emerged in an update to its user agreement<\/a> posted on January 20th, which insists users must not use \u201cbuy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end flow that attempts to place orders without human review\u201d on the site, unless eBay grants approval.<\/p>\n The revised agreement, and eBay\u2019s previous legalese, prohibit use of \u201cany robot, spider, scraper, data mining tools, data gathering and extraction tools, or other automated means to access our Services for any purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Some envisage simple \u201cBuy product X when it\u2019s available anywhere for $Y\u201d bots. Others, like management consultancy McKinsey, think we\u2019re headed for \u201ca world in which AI anticipates consumer needs, navigates shopping options, negotiates deals, and executes transactions, all in alignment with human intent yet acting independently via multistep chains of actions enabled by reasoning models.\u201d<\/p>\n The common denominator in those visions is that people stop visiting websites and therefore won\u2019t see any of the extra offers publishers use to boost their sales or engagement. Site operators will instead have to contend with bots programmed to never buy metaphorical fries with that, and which incessantly stress servers in search of a deal. E-commerce outfits would therefore need to add a machine-to-machine interface in addition to their human interfaces.<\/p>\n Google has volunteered to provide the machine-to-machine layer, and told The Register it doesn\u2019t envisage taking a cut of sales it facilitates. The company is, however, uncannily good at making itself an unavoidable player in markets it enters and then monetizing its dominance.<\/p>\n Amazon.com has already expressed its displeasure<\/a> with this vision by sending agentic AI company Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter that essentially says \u201cThis establishment does not serve shop-bots.\u201d<\/p>\n Google, however, says retailers appreciate the agentic commerce tools it launched<\/a> a couple of weeks ago.<\/p>\n