"The company's decision emerged in an update to its user agreement posted on January 20th, which insists users must not use "buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end flow that attempts to place orders without human review" on the site, unless eBay grants approval. The revised agreement, and eBay's previous legalese, prohibit use of "any robot, spider, scraper, data mining tools, data gathering and extraction tools, or other automated means to access our Services for any purpose.""
"The common denominator in those visions is that people stop visiting websites and therefore won't 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."
eBay updated its user agreement on January 20 to prohibit agentic shopping bots, buy‑for‑me agents, LLM‑driven bots, and any end‑to‑end flows that place orders without human review unless explicitly approved. The revised terms reiterate a ban on robots, spiders, scrapers, data mining, data gathering, and other automated means to access services. Proponents of agentic commerce envision autonomous agents that search, negotiate, and execute purchases on behalf of consumers, reducing direct website visits. That shift could bypass publisher offers, increase server load from deal‑seeking bots, and require e‑commerce platforms to implement machine‑to‑machine interfaces. Google has volunteered to provide such a layer.
Read at Theregister
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]