eBay appears to have blocked third-party AI agents from browsing

eBay appears to have blocked third-party AI agents, including Meta's Muse, from browsing its marketplace. A reader told The Verge that for several weeks Muse had curated a daily digest of watches for sale on platforms like eBay, but this weekend it could not pull links or details from the site. The Verge was able to recreate the experience with other search requests.

What changed on eBay

eBay previously updated its user agreement to ban tools such as buy-for-me agents and LLM-driven bots that place orders without human review. Until recently, agents like Muse were able to browse the site and pull listings for users. AI is becoming embedded throughout the platform for discovery, personalization, and the selling process, eBay spokesperson Sybille St. Arromand told The Verge in an email. St. Arromand declined to directly answer whether eBay recently imposed new limits on AI agents. She said that as it pertains to third parties, the company takes a selective approach to how they access and interact with its marketplace, and that it has restricted agent access in certain cases, including unauthorized scraping and training on its data. She also said eBay has ongoing discussions with potential partners and is evaluating ways third-party agents could help new customers discover eBay's unmatched inventory, with a focus on preserving the trusted end-to-end experience that buyers and sellers expect from eBay. Meta declined to comment.

How other companies handle agents

Retailers and service providers who have added AI features to their platforms have shown varying levels of comfort with third-party agents accessing their sites. On one end of the spectrum is Amazon, which is blocking external agents entirely from browsing or shopping. Some retailers like Target have restrictions in place that allow agents to successfully browse in some instances but get blocked in others. Shopify, meanwhile, has opened its catalog of a billion listings so that shoppers can set up their agents to purchase items on their behalf.

Broader questions about agentic commerce

Throwing agents into the e-commerce mix has the potential to upend how people shop online, partly because retail sites are largely assuming they are selling to humans, with human limitations, and not swarms of bots. For example, The Verge discovered in October that someone could use Muse to effectively hold product listings hostage on The RealReal, a secondhand designer consignment site, by having an agent continually add the product to the user's cart. The RealReal updated its bot system after The Verge's reporting. But as retailers tweak their sites in real time to handle bots, it remains unclear how widespread agentic commerce is. In fact, there are signs that most people are not using AI this way. Uber said it fulfilled only four rides via third-party agents in Q3 and only around 500 Uber Eats orders during the week of Halloween. DoorDash similarly said it fulfilled only several hundred orders placed via third-party agents. It reported 993 million total orders last quarter.

Sources: The Verge