eBay Encourages Buyers & Sellers To Use AI For The Holidays While Quietly Updating AI Agent Policy
eBay is encouraging buyers and sellers to "unwrap innovation" with AI this holiday season, while quietly updating website backend with new guidance placing guardrails and restrictions on how AI agents interact with the site.
First, in a post from the eBay News Team last week, the company is touting their various AI tools for both buyers and sellers - but doe they live up to the holiday hype?
Nov 25, 2025 By: eBay News Team
On the seller side, eBay says their suite of AI selling tools is designed to save sellers time and boost their visibility, allowing them to shine during the all important Q4 shopping season.
With many sellers increasing their inventory to meet the demand of holiday shoppers, streamlining the process to a few simple steps, starting with just an image, helps sellers quickly and easily list items with increased quality and accuracy.
Sellers can also use our background enhancement tool to spruce up their listing images with festive professional-grade backgrounds, taking listings to the next level.
What they didn't say is that "magical listing" still requires far too much manual entry and still fails to identify items in many cases.
Liz Morton
eBay also didn't mention the disappointing rollout of AI generated Store banners or the removal of the AI video creation tool for social media sharing as they "re-evaluate marketing tools for sellers."
Liz Morton
And apparently eBay also doesn't want to draw attention to their AI Activate program that provides thousands of UK sellers with free ChatGPT Enterprise access for a year - likely because sellers enrolled in the program have been less than impressed, expressing disappointment at having to use a separate third party app for AI functionality they feel should be built directly into the marketplace.
Liz Morton
On the buyer side, eBay says they are "delighting" customers with AI tools that "enable personalized discovery by applying deep category knowledge to help find unique and pre-loved items for everyone on your list."
Our AI tools enable personalized discovery by applying deep category knowledge to help find unique and pre-loved items for everyone on your list.
For instance eBay’s AI shopping assistant pilot, which started rolling out earlier this year, to take the stress out of holiday shopping with a fully-individualized experience.
We also leverage LLM-powered systems to provide curated fashion recommendations and trends for each individual shopper to spark inspiration and help find exactly what they’re looking for.
eBay Explore and Shop The Look for fashion recommendations are nothing new - they were introduced in mid-2024 - and the AI shopping assistant pilot launched earlier this year is still only available to a very tiny percentage of only US app users.
Liz Morton
Even worse, of the few users who do have access to it, many have taken to the eBay community to complain about it being an annoyance, unsuccessfully trying to find ways to turn it off completely.
Ai
How to remove the AI icon which appears on every page now. Covers the watch it icon. Tells me things like seller, item....blah blah. Hate it. Just in the way. Very distracting.
The new Experimental AI bottom right corner of my screen when looking at an order
I Don’t want it don’t need it how to delete it?
How do I disable this AI bullbleep
Suddenly my mobile app has this floating ai bullbleep in the bottom right corner. How do I disable it?
I haven't found a way to turn off the AI assistant, but I've seen a lot of complaints about it.
The best thing you can do is shake your phone while the app is open, then when the pop up appears, tap the 'send feedback' link and explain the problem. The more people filing reports, the more likelihood eBay will pay attention and give users an option to turn the assistant on/off.
If shaking doesn't trigger the pop up you can tap the ? or the 3 dots wherever you see them, or you can go to your settings page to turn on 'shake to report'.
eBay's holiday AI press release went on to say they are working with ChatGPT and other partners to make sure eBay listings are accessible to third-party agents.
Many shoppers now start their search on platforms like ChatGPT. We’re working with partners like OpenAI to make eBay’s inventory accessible through third-party agents and ensure a positive experience wherever the discovery journey begins.
Toward that end, Modern Retail reports that eBay has recently updated their robots.txt file to include a new “Robot & Agent Policy” providing guidance and guardrails for how agents should interact with the site, adding a new line that reads:
“Automated scraping, buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end flow that attempts to place orders without human review is strictly prohibited.”
Allison Smith
Information in a website's robots.txt file are only advisory and do not carry any legal weight in cases of non-compliance, but the presence of these directives means that compliant bots will be explicitly instructed not to access or manipulate the checkout process, signaling that unauthorized automation around purchasing is off-limits.
eBay is following in the footsteps of Amazon, Shopify, Walmart and others in setting out guidelines against unapproved AI scrapping or order placement while still leaving the door open for approved partnerships, like the OpenAI Operator collaboration announced earlier this year.
Liz Morton
Are eBay's AI tools helping or hindering your holiday buying and selling? Let us know in the comments below!
