eBay updated its User Agreement this week to explicitly ban third-party AI agents from making purchases without permission. The new terms, effective February 20, prohibit “buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end flow that attempts to place orders without human review.”
Agentic commerce bots are already operational across major platforms. OpenAI’s Atlas browser, launched in October 2025, includes an “Agent Mode” that can shop for users, add items to carts, and complete purchases across multiple sites from a single command. Perplexity’s Comet browser offers similar autonomous shopping capabilities.
eBay’s ban creates an interesting dynamic. The company acknowledges these agents exist and work well enough to require contractual prohibition. They want to manage how AI agents interact with their marketplace to protect seller relationships, maintain transaction fees, and preserve data about buyer behavior. Uncontrolled agent access could bypass eBay’s revenue model entirely.
Most of my clients are preparing for agentic commerce. While the technical capability already exists, the business models are still forming. No one quite knows who pays whom. eBay’s position suggests a future where platforms explicitly license AI agent access rather than fight them outright.
It is early days for consumer shopping bots and no one knows how powerful or important they will become. eBay’s vision may be exactly how this unfolds. I can easily imagine an ecommerce future where sellers expose offers via an API and shopping bots (with permission) shop agentically on behalf of their respective consumers. This kind of handshake would protect both buyers and sellers.
Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it. This work was created with the assistance of various generative AI models.