eBay bans illicit automated shopping amid rapid rise of AI agents

New policy requires “buy for me” AI tools and chatbots to obtain permission before accessing the platform.

On Tuesday, eBay updated its User Agreement to explicitly ban third-party “buy for me” agents and AI chatbots from interacting with its platform without permission, first spotted by Value Added Resource. On its face, a one-line terms of service update doesn’t seem like major news, but what it implies is more significant: The change reflects the rapid emergence of what some are calling “agentic commerce,” a new category of AI tools designed to browse, compare, and purchase products on behalf of users.

eBay’s updated terms, which go into effect on February 20, 2026, specifically prohibit users from employing “buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end flow that attempts to place orders without human review” to access eBay’s services without the site’s permission. The previous version of the agreement contained a general prohibition on robots, spiders, scrapers, and automated data gathering tools but did not mention AI agents or LLMs by name.

At first glance, the phrase “agentic commerce” may sound like aspirational marketing jargon, but the tools are already here, and people are apparently using them. While fitting loosely under one label, these tools come in many forms.

OpenAI first added shopping features to ChatGPT Search in April 2025, allowing users to browse product recommendations. By September, the company launched Instant Checkout, which lets users purchase items from Etsy and Shopify merchants directly within the chat interface. (In November, eBay CEO Jamie Iannone suggested the company might join OpenAI’s Instant Checkout program in the future.)

Elsewhere, Perplexity offers “Buy with Pro,” a one-click checkout feature for its paying subscribers. Google recently announced its Universal Commerce Protocol, an open standard for AI agents to interact with retailers. And Amazon offers a “Buy For Me” feature, which uses AI to purchase items from external brand websites within the Amazon app.

Even with new restrictions, eBay leaves the door open

eBay’s policy update follows the company’s quiet changes to its robots.txt file in December, a special file on a web server that lists rules and prohibitions that sites hope web-crawling bots will follow. According to Modern Retail, eBay added a new “Robot & Agent Policy” to the file that prohibited automated scraping and buy-for-me agents. eBay later updated the file to add explicit blocks against bots from Perplexity, Anthropic, Amazon, and others, though it allowed Google’s shopping bot to access the site.

However, restrictions in robots.txt files are basically honor-system suggestions. By adding the language to its User Agreement, eBay can now more easily take legal action against users or companies who violate the policy.

Notably, even with this general mood against robotic commerce from outsiders, eBay’s new User Agreement policy does not prevent the company from developing its own AI shopping tools. CEO Jamie Iannone said on an October earnings call that eBay is “testing a variety of agentic experiences in search and shopping.” The rules also allow such bots “with the prior express permission of eBay,” which could open the door to official shopping partnerships with companies like OpenAI.

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Posted Friday 23 January 2026 at 4:05 am AEST (my time).

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