Something like “I want an old mini PC to use as a home server, it should have roughly these specs and cost under this amount”, and then an LLM would run some searches every day, parse the results and send me a message if something comes up.

It’s pretty easy to get alerts for when items are available for a certain price if you know the exact item you want, but on eBay and classifieds sites, I usually just want something in a rough ballpark, and the best way to find that is come back and check every day looking through searches.

I don’t really see any value in having the AI do the purchase itself though.

Feedback still flows through metrics and policies, but it no longer carries enough of a cue to guide real learning, so it gets inverted into compliance and arbitration instead. Risk management becomes the substitute for understanding, and when context collapses, meaning drifts.

The businesses that win will be the ones that build AI-agent-friendly interfaces, not the ones that try to ban them. eBay is protecting their ad revenue and impulse-buy funnel in the short term, but they're ceding the future to whoever figures out how to make agent-compatible commerce work.

Every product and platform will eventually have an "agent API" alongside their human UI. The only question is who builds it first.

No wonder Facebook marketplace has destroyed them

ex: "...parts only", "foo for bar", ...

How likely am I to get the wrong product entirely or something that I can't actually use.

I've also had to return a few items for which eBay's AI-generated description was wrong in ways that couldn't be verified in the product's images. I can only imagine the increase in canceled/returned orders from all the different AI features and bots.

Data’s the only moat left. Companies like stack overflow need to build revenue streams from AI or they will cease to exist.

By banning bots and then licensing some kind of access, eBay can protect itself from merely being a listing point that no human actually visits. Tailwind and their adverts via docs model, eBay and its promoted listings model, we’re going to see businesses adapt or die on this.

I imagine this type of automation existed before LLM agents came along - what do they add? Is it just the ability to evaluate the product description? Item quality is already listed as a categorical variable.

I’m not a huge ebayer but I’m usually watching one or two auctions at a time. The problem is that you can’t disallow marketing notifications. So, if I want to be usefully alerted for a new item in a search, or that I’ve been outbid, or the imminent end of an auction, I’ll also be getting notifications and emails about all kinds of shit I don’t care about. $5 off coupons (that only apply to 8 items that I don’t want). “You might like this!” notifications (spoiler: I never do). Group buying times (who cares?).

So I either disable ALL notifications (and have an LLM write a script that crawls searches manually and much more appropriately notifies me on its own), or I enable notifications and get a bunch of trash spam.

As it relates to specifically to buying, we’ve known for a long time that we’re all up against some kind of bot that’s timed the exact last moment and amount to outbid us. It’s no fun.

I’ve been an eBay user since 1998 and it’s been on a very slow roll of enshittification since then.

Make your experience better for humans and maybe we’d be less inclined to outsource negative experiences to AI.

if it was some Bozo executive as we see at most tech companies - they would be advocating to implement the Open Agentic Commerce whatever being pushed by google while not noticing its killing their own company

My question then becomes, does this policy violate the ADA for those users in particular? UIf it doesn't today, should it tomorrow? Especially if these AI browsers actually become viable for those users. Will there be a future where if you're protected by ADA you can be cleared to use a more automated browser? I would imagine a sane rule for such an exception would require you to fully identify yourself to the website in order to prevent abuse by bots pretending to need that type of access (the good old "trust me bro" problem). Or maybe they get to use it but it becomes more rate limited to the average user speed or whatever.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527950

Just like faxes, the internet and the world wide web, sure, this new thing Could connect everything, but that's not nearly as much of a technical problem as a sociopolitical one. Same as it ever was.

Impossible to enforce, they can read browser windows and pass captchas

Marketplaces like eBay are designed to monetize 'Wandering Attention'—sponsored listings, 'customers also bought', and sidebar ads.

An AI Agent represents 'Laser Focused Attention'. It executes a transaction with zero wandering. It effectively turns the marketplace into a commoditized backend database / dumb pipe.

From a Growth/Unit Economics perspective, an AI Agent is a nightmare customer. It has zero probability of impulse buying and generates zero ad revenue. They are banning them to save their business model, not their inventory.