On Tuesday, eBay updated its User Agreement to explicitly ban third-party “buy for me” agents and AI chatbots from interacting with its platform without permission, first spotted by Value Added Resource. On its face, a one-line terms of service update doesn’t look like major news, but what it implies is more significant: The change reflects the rapid emergence of what some are calling “agentic commerce,” a brand new category of AI tools designed to browse, compare, and buy products on behalf of users.
eBay’s updated terms, which go into effect on February 20, 2026, specifically prohibit users from employing “buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end flow that attempts to put orders without human review” to access eBay’s services without the positioning’s permission. The previous version of the agreement contained a general prohibition on robots, spiders, scrapers, and automatic data gathering tools but didn’t mention AI agents or LLMs by name.
At first glance, the phrase “agentic commerce” may sound like aspirational marketing jargon, however the tools are already here, and individuals are apparently using them. While fitting loosely under one label, these tools are available many forms.
OpenAI first added shopping features to ChatGPT Search in April 2025, allowing users to browse product recommendations. By September, the corporate launched Quick Checkout, which lets users purchase items from Etsy and Shopify merchants directly inside the chat interface. (In November, eBay CEO Jamie Iannone suggested the corporate might join OpenAI’s Quick Checkout program in the longer term.)
