eBay announced in a recent email to users that starting Feb. 20, it will prohibit third-party chatbots and AI agents from autonomously placing orders on its platform.
The change aligns with updates to eBay’s user agreement, which restricts automated tools from making purchases on the platform.
The ban, which will be part of its new terms of use agreement, will prohibit buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end flow that attempts to place orders without human review, according to reports in TechSpot and Ars Technica.
However, the new rules do allow AI entities to access the e-commerce platform if they obtain prior approval from eBay.
“We periodically update our User Agreement to ensure it reflects our published policies for how automated systems may interact with eBay,” the company said in a statement provided to the E-Commerce Times.
“Unauthorized agentic tools and bots are not permitted to access or take actions on our platform,” it continued. “These rules help keep interactions predictable and safe, so we can protect buyers and sellers, apply appropriate safeguards and usage limits, and maintain a reliable experience.”
eBay added that it continues to explore the best use cases for agentic commerce both on and off our platform, to best serve our customers.
“eBay isn’t banning AI on principle,” asserted Bill Schneider, vice president of product marketing at CommerceIQ, an AI-powered retail e-commerce optimization platform in Mountain View, Calif. “It’s banning uncontrolled, unauthorized autonomous shopping bots that can compete unfairly with humans and threaten marketplace revenue.”
“As a commission-based platform, if bots drive prices down efficiently, eBay stands to lose revenue,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “It reserves the right to let approved or internal AI systems operate, suggesting a cautious, controlled approach to agentic commerce rather than outright rejection.”
Operational Risks of Agentic Commerce
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Agents can also pose operational headaches for eBay.
“For auctions, agents can create the image of unfair competition and could drive away bidders,” explained Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst at the Enderle Group, an advisory services firm in Bend, Ore. “For fixed-price items, it could result in more purchase disputes as AIs make mistakes and purchase things that weren’t properly described or where the user failed to adequately prompt the AI.”
“This feels more like a pause as eBay figures out the risks and rewards of using this new technology,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
“This is just one of a large and increasing number of decisions tied to the fact that the world wasn’t at all ready for AI, let alone AI at scale, and so companies and individuals are struggling to catch up and understand how to benefit from the good of this technology, and mitigate the bad,” he added.
Little Immediate Impact
Although the move won’t have an immediate impact on eBay users’ experience, it could have future consequences.
“The immediate impact is mostly defensive and operational,” said David Eberle, co-founder and CEO of Typewise, a builder of AI agents and text-prediction technology for enterprise customer service, in Zurich. “eBay is reducing the risk of automated checkout abuse — fraud, scalping-style behaviors, account compromise — and protecting marketplace integrity.”
“But strategically, the bigger impact is that eBay is drawing a line between AI as a discovery/referral layer and AI as a transaction/execution layer,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
“Agentic checkout — true buy-for-me — is still early,” he explained. “What’s already real at scale today is AI-driven discovery traffic, humans using ChatGPT-like tools for product research and then clicking through.”
“So the ban likely won’t immediately kill a huge volume of autonomous purchases, because that volume is probably not dominant yet,” he continued. “But it does shape the future. It signals eBay wants AI agents to be permissioned, authenticated, and measurable, not uncontrolled browser automation.”
“E-commerce is shifting from ‘websites for humans’ to ‘platforms with agent rails,’ and eBay’s move is an early governance step in that shift,” he added.
Blocking Agents Carries Long-Term Risk
While agentic shopping is still in its early days, Dustin Engel, co-founder and principal consultant at Elegant Disruption, a strategy- and AI-focused consulting firm in Philadelphia, pointed out that by 2030, analysts forecast AI agents could handle somewhere between US$190 billion and $385 billion in U.S. e-commerce sales.
“If eBay is blocking agents while Amazon, Walmart, and everyone else are rolling out the red carpet, they’re essentially betting they can build a better mousetrap faster than the market moves,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “That’s a risky play.”
Banning AI agents will likely leave eBay further behind in e-commerce, contended Jason Boyce, founder and CEO of Avenue7Media, which provides account management, advertising, compliance, and catalog optimization services for e-commerce brands, in San Antonio, Texas.
“Marketplaces and brands that embrace Agentic AI now, rather than swim against the tide, will win the next decade,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
“I understand the reasons why a platform would want to protect its proprietary data, including customer information; however, this ship has sailed,” he said. “Agentic shopping is happening now, and it will not stop. Tech has also advanced to the point where ‘site blocks’ can be beaten. If an agentic shopper can only find a product on eBay, agents will find a way, regardless of what eBay does to block them. It’s inevitable.”
Challenge of Blocking Agents
Blocking AI agents is a lot more challenging than blocking traditional bots because they behave a lot more like humans, particularly since they have been trained to act on behalf of humans, added Zbyněk Sopuch, CTO of Safetica, an intelligent data security solutions provider headquartered in Prague.
“AI agents also use browsers, and they switch up behavior similar to the way people do, so they are trickier to track for patterns,” he told E-Commerce Times.
Blocking for AI agents is a delicate balancing act because if you block too aggressively, you are likely to block real customers,” he said. “But then, if you don’t block enough, the abuse risk rises to a significant level. Unfortunately, traditional security controls aren’t the answer here because they merely look at identity when, in this case, you have to monitor specific behavior.”
“Perhaps the greatest challenge of all in this,” he continued, “is for eBay to determine the difference between a ‘fast human’ and an aggressive machine,’ without compromising the overall platform experience for everyone else.”
Mark N. Vena, president and principal analyst of SmartTech Research, a technology advisory firm in Las Vegas, explained that bots blend into traffic using headless browsers, stolen sessions, and human-like interaction patterns, making pure bot detection an arms race.
“Platforms also risk blocking legit accessibility tools and power users, so they need layered controls like risk scoring, rate limits, and step-up verification,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
Will Others Follow Suit?
eBay isn’t alone in trying to regulate the use of its platform by agents. “Most retailers will allow agents only through partnerships or approved programs, because they want control, measurement, and monetization,” Vena said. “If agentic shopping scales, open access becomes the exception, not the rule.”
“It’s tricky territory for many marketplaces and retailers,” added Greg Sterling, co-founder of Near Media, a market research firm in San Francisco.
“You want to own the customer and not weaken the brand by simply having your content become ‘data,’” he told the E-Commerce Times, “but agentic shopping will probably dilute the third-party brand. On the other hand, if you don’t participate and it becomes mainstream, you’ve lost that sale.”
Whether a retailer will emulate eBay’s policy on agentic shopping depends on how shopping is conducted on the retailer’s site, noted Ryan W. Bailes, of Bailes Zindler, a digital agency in Tyler, Texas, that builds websites, SEO programs, and paid media campaigns for businesses.
“On eBay, it makes sense not to allow AI to snipe up a deal for someone who isn’t actively looking,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “For small businesses on Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and such, this is a great way for people to find your products and purchase them without even going to your store. “
“The catch is,” he added, “you have to have all the needed information on your products in order for AI to shop correctly.”
Fragmented Agentic World
Scott Dylan, founder of NexaTech Ventures, a venture capital firm in Dublin, Ireland, maintained that the market is headed toward a fractured landscape where each major platform develops its own walled garden with proprietary agents. “Amazon, eBay, Etsy — they’re all building native agents while blocking external ones,” he told the E-Commerce Times.
“The platforms that move fast will try to set standards that favor their ecosystems,” he continued. “Think of it like the early streaming wars — everyone wants to be Netflix, nobody wants to be Blockbuster.”
“The risk is that we end up with incompatible agent protocols across platforms, forcing consumers to use different agents for different marketplaces,” he said. “That’s a terrible user experience, but it serves platform interests perfectly.”
“Many retailers are in a predicament with AI agents, and eBay is no exception,” added Katherine Black, partner and food, drug, and mass market lead for the global strategy and management consulting firm Kearney.
“On the one hand, they do not want to be disintermediated by agentic platforms, but on the other, they certainly do not want to miss a traffic stream,” she told the E-Commerce Times.
“In the short-term, eBay may benefit from this ban because it gives them time to tune their protocols for agents and make the adjustments that they need to make for their site and their business model in the long-term, and traffic is still relatively small,” she continued.
“This also gives eBay some potential leverage to negotiate on take rates and advertising,” she explained. “That space is changing rapidly, and it can have a dramatic impact on a retailer’s business.”
