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Comment by advisedwang | Hacker News Reader

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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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.

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.

They should treat it like freight forwarders. They're allowed, but when you use one you don't get the return policy.

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

This; "certified / authorized by eBay" and then agents have to pay access to the catalogue

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.

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.

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