I learned that Ebay updated its terms of service to explicitly prohibit the use of “buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end flow that attempts to place orders without human review” on site (Liz Morton for Value Added Resource, January 21 2026). This sounds like a sound policy to me. Even were I to set aside my negative view of buy for me agents, I doubt that Ebay or individual sellers on Ebay (some of whom provide great and novel service) want to deal with angry customers who outsourced their brains and wallets to AI. But I would not have covered the story here but for a note in Ms. Morton’s report on the policy change:

It also comes on the heels of Amazon’s controversial Buy For Me test which uses agentic AI to display items from direct merchant websites for sale through the Amazon app, even if the brand does not sell on Amazon themselves – raising concerns about transparency, consent, and control over how product details are displayed to buyers.

Back in November, I published a short post in support of Amazon’s decision to block Perplexity AI from making purchases on behalf of Perplexity users.