eBay has been one of the largest e-shopping platforms for decades, but with a twist: instead of selling the products itself, it\u2019s more of an auction platform. The e-commerce company is now moving to confront what it sees as a new challenge: \u201cagentic shopping\u201d and other aggressive AI-powered bots that compete with human users who pay to use the platform.<\/p>\n
Beginning February 20, 2026, eBay will formally ban chatbots and AI agents from operating on its auction site. The company plans to revise its user agreement to include a specific update addressing the use of \u201cautomated means\u201d to access eBay\u2019s services. This step was welcomed by many, as automated tools have plagued the platform for years now.<\/p>\n
The policy change was announced in a recent email sent to users. Under the updated agreement, eBay strengthens its anti-scraping rules and explicitly prohibits artificial intelligence systems, large language models, and other automated tools designed to place purchase orders without direct human involvement. According to the email, any AI-based system seeking to operate on the platform must first obtain eBay’s explicit approval.<\/p>\n
These changes follow earlier updates to eBay\u2019s robots.txt file, which now explicitly signals that bots and AI technologies are not welcome. \u201cCheckouts are strictly for human users,\u201d the file states.<\/p>\n
Perhaps disappointingly, the changes are mostly legal, with execution being a whole other issue. The revised user agreement creates a meaningful legal obstacle for automated crawlers run by large technology firms or AI startups, but such obstacles are usually ignored by malicious actors.<\/p>\n
AI-driven shopping may appear impractical to many, and its real-world value remains unclear, but some users are already testing such tools. So-called agentic commerce features have been added to ChatGPT, including a checkout capability that lets users make purchases directly on platforms such as Etsy and Shopify.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
eBay has been one of the largest e-shopping platforms for decades, but with a twist: instead of selling the products itself, it\u2019s more of an auction platform. The e-commerce company is now moving to confront what it sees as a new challenge: \u201cagentic shopping\u201d and other aggressive AI-powered bots that compete with human users who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":254,"featured_media":451479,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":[],"meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_breakdance_hide_in_design_set":false,"_breakdance_tags":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[29330],"tags":[29352,29473,29436],"audience-intent":[],"content-types":[],"country":[],"entity":[],"persona":[],"class_list":["post-451477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-e-commerce","tag-internet"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/menatech.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/menatech.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/menatech.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/menatech.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/menatech.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=451477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/menatech.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451477\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/menatech.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/451479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/menatech.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=451477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/menatech.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=451477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/menatech.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=451477"},{"taxonomy":"audience-intent","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/menatech.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/audience-intent?post=451477"},{"taxonomy":"content-types","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/menatech.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/content-types?post=451477"},{"taxonomy":"country","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/menatech.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/country?post=451477"},{"taxonomy":"entity","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/menatech.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/entity?post=451477"},{"taxonomy":"format","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/menatech.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/format?post=451477"},{"taxonomy":"persona","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/menatech.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/persona?post=451477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}