LLM-initiated purchases probably rack up chargebacks, support calls, etc for mistakes the LLM makes. I'm not surprised they want to limit it.

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jsheard 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I might be out of the loop, but are agents actually out there buying stuff from "unwilling" vendors at any significant scale? I thought that was still mostly limited to opt-in partnerships with retailers. Still, eBay might be anticipating the issues you mentioned and trying to get ahead of them.

	▲	Nkharrl 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not commonly known (I work in this space), but yes. Agents are being used to automate things like non-cash account balance arbitrage, stacking and abusing marketing promotions, triangulated purchasing schemes, and purchase-refund arbitrage schemes at an increasingly large scale.

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doctoboggan 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

More likely, they want to be the exclusive provider of LLMs that can purchase off of eBay, or at least charge for API access.

	▲	nxobject 15 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		They may have an inkling that the big LLM companies will want to pay for future/past data... I imagine either Google or OpenAI has something predictive and shopping-related in the books.
	▲	rvnx 15 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		This; "certified / authorized by eBay" and then agents have to pay access to the catalogue

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lukev 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Right -- this seems more of a protective measure than something they will proactively enforce.

If you have a well-behaved agent that uses a browser to buy on eBay, I doubt that will cause issues. But if it leads to issues, they can point to that clause instead of having to help repair the issues caused by someone else's software.