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

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 comes up.

I don’t really see any value in having the AI do the purchase itself though.

So scraping bots and “buy for me” bots are bad, but the incredibly annoying sniping bots are OK? That sure feels like a double standard.

You don't have to obey user agreements.

Meanwhile Google announces UCP to go in completely the opposite direction (or make marketplaces like eBay do so)

Tried selling on eBay as a regular Joe lately? Item sold for roughly $190 and I lost $45 in fees - I didn't even have a premium ad or pay for any of the boosting.

No wonder Facebook marketplace has destroyed them

Oh so just “human review “ it

Smells like an opportunity

What is the use case for LLM agent shoppers? I can't imagine delegating the purchase of a used item to an AI (I'd be okay with AI identifying the best deals for me to review). This must be something for people who are doing something at scale like flipping items on Ebay or drop shipping.

I imagine this type of automation existed before LLM agents came along - what do they add? Is it just the ability to evaluate the product description? Item quality is already listed as a categorical variable.

LLM-initiated purchases probably rack up chargebacks, support calls, etc for mistakes the LLM makes. I'm not surprised they want to limit it.

...haven't bots been buying things off eBay since the 90s?

I loved early eBay but gave up on it once became clear how rife it was with bid snipers, fraudsters and stolen goods.

not the User Agreement!

Impossible to enforce, they can read browser windows and pass captchas

No one wants AI to spend their money, checked or not. The few people who would want AI, want AI to save them money

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

Hasn't eBay's traffic been 80% bots since day one? I haven't participated in an auction in forever because even 20 years ago you were guaranteed to get sniped by a bot on anything except actual garbage.