[HN Gopher] eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user ...
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eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement
update
Author : bdcravens
Score : 76 points
Date : 2026-01-21 21:07 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.valueaddedresource.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.valueaddedresource.net)
| advisedwang wrote:
| LLM-initiated purchases probably rack up chargebacks, support
| calls, etc for mistakes the LLM makes. I'm not surprised they
| want to limit it.
| doctoboggan wrote:
| More likely, they want to be the exclusive provider of LLMs
| that can purchase off of eBay, or at least charge for API
| access.
| rvnx wrote:
| This; "certified / authorized by eBay" and then agents have
| to pay access to the catalogue
| nxobject wrote:
| They may have an inkling that the big LLM companies will want
| to pay for future/past data... I imagine either Google or
| OpenAI has something predictive and shopping-related in the
| books.
| lukev wrote:
| Right -- this seems more of a protective measure than something
| they will proactively enforce.
|
| If you have a well-behaved agent that uses a browser to buy on
| eBay, I doubt that will cause issues. But if it leads to
| issues, they can point to that clause instead of having to help
| repair the issues caused by someone else's software.
| jsheard wrote:
| I might be out of the loop, but are agents actually out there
| buying stuff from "unwilling" vendors at any significant scale?
| I thought that was still mostly limited to opt-in partnerships
| with retailers. Still, eBay might be anticipating the issues
| you mentioned and trying to get ahead of them.
| Nkharrl wrote:
| Not commonly known (I work in this space), but yes.
|
| Agents are being used to automate things like non-cash
| account balance arbitrage, stacking and abusing marketing
| promotions, triangulated purchasing schemes, and purchase-
| refund arbitrage schemes at an increasingly large scale.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| not the User Agreement!
|
| Impossible to enforce, they can read browser windows and pass
| captchas
| wobblyasp wrote:
| Probably less about direct enforcement, more about after the
| fact. Ebay doesn't want to deal with charge backs for
| hallucinate purchases
| petcat wrote:
| Yeah, they're hedging against "AI purchases". eBay has
| already been dealing with automated/bots for years.
| mandeepj wrote:
| > Ebay doesn't want to deal with charge backs for hallucinate
| purchases
|
| A charge back doesn't mean buyer always wins. Imagine if
| credit card companies also pass a rule - "LLM or AI purchases
| are non-refundable".
|
| On a different note - once I tried to cancel an eBay order
| within a minute, both eBay and seller declined. It's so fked
| up with them.
| drum55 wrote:
| eBay is hyper aggressive about fingerprinting, they will catch
| things like it trivially. Browsers leak all sorts of
| information like what sockets are open on localhost, making
| yourself look like an actual person is very challenging to
| someone motivated to detect you.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| LLMs don't need browser automation though. Multimodal models
| with vision input can operate a _real_ computer with "real"
| user inputs over USB, where the computer itself returns a
| real, plausible browser fingerprint because it _is_ a real
| browser being operated by something that behaves humanly.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| > Impossible to enforce
|
| Maybe, but a policy's or law's validity or importance are not
| contingent on them being enforceable.
| drnick1 wrote:
| This. These kinds of "rules" are basically useless because they
| are not enforceable. It's exactly like having speed limits but
| no cops.
| whyenot wrote:
| 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.
| theamk wrote:
| sniping bots keep people on ebay.com
| jader201 wrote:
| I think AI is going to level the playing field with all these
| bots that have been used for things like this (including
| scalpers for those low supply/high demand items), and retailers
| will (hopefully) have no choice but to address the issue once
| everyone starts to use/abuse them.
|
| I can only hope.
| jsheard wrote:
| What's the point of sniping bots when eBay has automatic
| bidding? Counter-sniping is essentially built-in, if your price
| ceiling is higher then a snipers then you're guaranteed to win
| even if they bid at the last millisecond.
| noman-land wrote:
| The act of bidding itself shows interest and raises the
| price.
| pishpash wrote:
| Auto bid raises the price to the second highest price among
| auto bidders, basically running an instant second-price
| auction. Sniping avoids running these pre-close auctions.
| CompuHacker wrote:
| The act of viewing the item page in itself demonstrates
| activity and is relayed to other users; leaking information
| about, not necessarily intent, but awareness. If you want
| something, figure out the details without actually clicking
| on it.
| pishpash wrote:
| Auto bid isn't the same as sniping. Sniping hides information
| about demand. Auto bid can't hide information as soon as
| there is another bidder.
| dingaling wrote:
| Establishing the price ceiling is difficult, though. You
| might arbitrarily set it as $23, but be sniped at $23.30. The
| sniper bot only needs to bid that small increment over your
| arbitrary ceiling.
|
| Can you really say that $23 was your hard limit, or would you
| have paid $23.40? Unless you're buying something also
| available at retail, nobody can be that accurate in
| foresight.
|
| Sniping removes the 'contemplation window' to reconsider your
| bid.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Then just put your actual hard limit in as your bid, and
| sleep soundly, knowing that if someone pays $0.01 more,
| it's OK because you wouldn't have wanted to pay that
| anyway.
|
| I've never really been bothered by "sniping" in eBay. I
| always bid my absolute 100% maximum, and if someone bids
| more than me, then they can have it.
| bena wrote:
| It gets into the nature of "Which grain of sand makes it
| a pile?"
|
| Knowing people bid snipe by bidding one cent over whole
| dollars, would you consistently bid two cents over if it
| meant you would win more of your auctions?
|
| One cent is negligible. If you asked me if I would have
| paid $10.01 instead of $10.00, I'd probably say "Sure".
| $10.02? $10.03? Like, where does the line get drawn?
|
| And then you come at it from the other way. Let's say I'd
| pay $10, but not $11. But what about $10.50? $10.25? Or
| we can go down by pennies again.
|
| I agree, put in your limit and walk away. If you get
| overbid, even by a cent, don't sweat it. That's the game.
| But I can see why people get frustrated when they lose an
| auction by one cent.
| pwg wrote:
| From what I understand, the reasoning behind the snipe method
| of bidding is to avoid showing to other bidders that there is
| interest, leading to the, supposed, outcome of more likely
| being the only bidder and thereby receiving the item at the
| sellers starting bid price (or slightly above) rather than at
| the "max one was willing to pay" price.
| nutjob2 wrote:
| Sniping is the only way to bid for two reasons:
|
| - bidding more than once and allowing time for others to
| counter bid drives up the price through competition for the
| item. Sniping also removes the temptation to counter bid,
| rather than to stick to your maximum bid.
|
| - not sniping allows the seller to do ghost bidding, letting
| them discover your maximum price (including counter bidding).
| Here someone always out bid you (the ghost bidder) but the
| seller says the winner didn't complete the sale so offers it
| to you at your highest bid.
| pishpash wrote:
| Scraping and buy for me bots cut out eBay. Sniping bots don't.
| j45 wrote:
| This was my thought as well, sniping bots have been around for
| as long as ebay has. Perhaps though, the sniping bots don't
| cause as much load on ebay's infrastructure?
| BeetleB wrote:
| I never understood why eBay set things up to enable sniping.
|
| Many years ago, there was an auction site called uBid. They had
| the sane rule: Bidding is open as long as there have been bids
| in the past 5 minutes.
|
| So the end date could be January 24th, 3pm, but if someone bids
| at 2:58pm, the deadline is extended to 3:05pm. And it keeps
| going.
|
| You know, like how auctions in the real world work.
| pishpash wrote:
| There is no need for that. They only need to implement a
| closing auction like stock markets. But eBay hasn't done
| anything since the 1990's except raise fees.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > But eBay hasn't done anything since the 1990's except
| raise fees.
|
| Meanwhile it's now 100% free to sell on eBay for non-
| professional sellers.
|
| https://www.ebay.co.uk/help/selling/fees-credits-
| invoices/fe...
| jsheard wrote:
| That's semantic sleight of hand, they replaced the
| "seller fee" with a "buyer protection fee" which is
| transparently bundled into the sale price. Either way the
| seller ends up with less money than they sold the item
| for.
|
| Before: Buyer pays PS100, seller receives PS100, seller
| later billed PS5 fees.
|
| After: Buyer pays PS100, eBay pockets PS5 protection fee,
| seller receives PS95.
| pwg wrote:
| > it's now 100% free to sell
|
| Nice:
|
| > You won't pay final value fees or regulatory operating
| fees
|
| Of course, they will likely find some other way to
| extract their fees.
|
| It would be nice, however, if the final value fee went
| away for US non-professional sellers.
|
| There does seem to be no indication (at least on the page
| you linked) of how they define "private seller", which
| also opens up the possibility of them defining it so
| narrowly that, say, only five UK residents ever qualify.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Only in the UK, and only on "private sellers". eBay is
| losing a lot of marketshare in the UK so they've taken
| drastic measures to try to get people listing again.
| pwg wrote:
| Another eBay precursor auction side, onsale.com, had the same
| setup. The auction ended at X date/time _or_ five or ten
| minutes (I forget which) after the last bid was made.
| gpt5 wrote:
| Guessing here - but they are probably relying on game theory
| / auction theory. They have a built in "sniping bot" - by
| allowing you to type your highest price, and it will auto-bid
| for you until that price.
|
| The fear of being sniped encourages you to bid your maximum
| value, and not just wait and see if you can sneak in a lower
| bid. This is what all auction sites want.
| postalrat wrote:
| Except nobody uses it that way. Auctions are rare
| themselves. Sellers dont like it, buyers dont like it yet
| ebay won't change it.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| People will pay a premium to win, not everyone but enough
| to make it worth it.
| mkl wrote:
| This how Trade Me (NZ auction site) works: any bid in the
| last 2 minutes delays the close time to 2 minutes after the
| bid. That can happen repeatedly, and I've seen it go on for
| over 20 minutes on highly contended auctions. It works well.
| Retr0id wrote:
| I've bought hundreds of things on ebay over the years and I've
| never understood the issue with "sniping".
|
| Sure, I've been outbid at the last moment. Losing an auction is
| always a little frustrating. But if I was willing to pay that
| price I should have bid it myself. Feels fair enough?
| tkzed49 wrote:
| why would you bid the highest price you can afford in an
| auction? the seller agreed to auction the thing; they could
| have just offered it for a set price.
| HotHotLava wrote:
| Do you not know how ebay works? You put in the maximum
| price you're willing to pay, and if you win you're paying
| 2nd highest bid + 1. So you don't save any money by
| starting with a low bid.
| gnopgnip wrote:
| Buy for me bots results in more returns, cancellations, item
| not as described and other problems ebay and sellers have to
| deal with
| downrightmike wrote:
| No one wants AI to spend their money, checked or not. The few
| people who would want AI, want AI to save them money
| subroutine wrote:
| 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.
| akersten wrote:
| Does it need a known and enumerated use case to be allowed? I
| don't like that implication.
|
| An AI that shops for a blind user, for one free example of the
| untold and unexplored uses of new technology.
| pishpash wrote:
| How do ticket scalpers make money? It's an automation war. You
| can run arbitrage strategies at scale if you can scrape markets
| with bots that understand unstructured data. Even if trades go
| wrong sometimes it can be profitable on average.
| observationist wrote:
| "Hey, ChatGPT/Grok/GeneriBot4000, please watch for a great deal
| on a 1982 stratocaster guitar - must be in good or better
| condition, $600 or less, and if you see it, go ahead and buy it
| without confirmation"
|
| Ongoing tasks, arbitrage for mispriced postings in ways that
| aren't currently exploited that LLMs make feasible - by banning
| auto-buy, maybe they're attempting to delineate between human
| seeming behavior and automation, and giving AI permission to
| buy looks too much like a real person?
|
| Seems pretty petty to me.
| subroutine wrote:
| Yeah I guess that makes sense for some people. I'm just not
| in a financial position where I'd let an AI buy a $600 used
| guitar without me every having seen it.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Yeah literally price mistakes being picked up right away. But
| also seems like a good way to get scammed.
| some_random wrote:
| "Hey ChatGPT I want to build my own personal cloud storage
| computer, buy all the hardware for me then walk me through
| building and configuring it. My budget is $600, try to get the
| best deals and make sure that all the parts are compatible. I'm
| fine with used parts as long as they're a good deal and are in
| working order."
| subroutine wrote:
| You would really do this? You'd not even want to at least
| briefly review the cart before making a $600 purchase of used
| computer hardware?
| WarmWash wrote:
| "Hey ChatGPT, I need more glass cleaner"
|
| *OpenAI issues a micro auction to glass cleaner companies and
| distributors to see who will bid the highest combined
| commision*
|
| "Sure thing! I ordered some Glass Clean Plus from Target for
| you!"
| Terr_ wrote:
| [delayed]
| estimator7292 wrote:
| 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.
| dankwizard wrote:
| 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
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