eBay Bans Third-Party AI Shopping, or "Agentic Commerce"

­eBay is taking a stand against what’s become known as “agentic commerce” – with third-party “buy for me” agents and AI chatbots interacting with the site and making purchasing decisions on behalf of customers. But is this a token act of resistance – is agentic commerce the future, as inevitable as AI, itself?

The e-commerce giant dropped the following into subsection 3, “Using eBay”, of the latest user agreement:

Members may not “use any robot, spider, scraper, data mining tools, data gathering and extraction tools, or other automated means (including, without limitation buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end flow that attempts to place orders without human review) to access our Services for any purpose, except with the prior express permission of eBay.”

What that amounts to is a ban on AI-assisted purchasing agents without the permission of eBay. That last part is key, and all of this is, of course, subject to change.

It’s easy to see the appeal of agentic commerce, as it helps consumers cut through then marketing fluff, and as we’ve already seen, AI (and non-AI marketing tools) often know us better than we know ourselves. And the data bears that out.

In the 2025 State of Ecommerce survey, a full 64% of shoppers admitted using generative AI to shop, and 58% were comfortable with it.

It’s also easy to see why retailers and e-tailers might be uncomfortable with the idea. All manner of merchants have spent thousands of years perfecting the notion of the storefront, with the latest models adept at funneling customers exactly where companies want them and with marketing gusto that can, as the idiom goes, sell ice to Eskimos.

AI renders all of that meaningless, at least theoretically, and only focuses on what each individual customer wants and needs.

But it’s entirely possible companies may reverse course on the idea at the same time consumers are souring on it.

Because no matter how bespoke the AI agents get, you’re still surrendering a substantial amount of control – potentially regarding huge, life-changing purchases. And if companies think that enough customers approve of the idea – accurately or not – they might reason that surrendering some control with their own storefronts leads to more sales.

With eBay, specifically, it’s unclear whether the new guidelines prohibit bid-sniping software, which has been a thing for far longer than AI commerce – ever lost an auction in the closing tenths of a second? Yeah, you were sniped by a program, not a person.

eBay’s new terms go into effect February 20, 2026.