🛒eBay Blocks Meta's Muse Agent From Browsing Listings, Amazon Shuts Out Agents Entirely

Your shopping agent just got locked out of eBay

eBay appears to have blocked AI agents, Meta's Muse included, from browsing its listings. A reader ran Muse for weeks to curate a daily digest of watches, and then it simply stopped working. Muse told them it was blocked from the site. The Verge reproduced the failure, and in some cases Muse pointed users to outside sites mirroring eBay listings instead. If you're building anything that relies on third-party agents touching commerce sites, this is your warning. eBay had already banned "buy-for-me agents" and "LLM-driven bots" that place orders without human review. Amazon is blocking external agents outright. Target is inconsistent, letting agents through sometimes and blocking them at other times. Retail sites still assume a human is on the other end, with human limits and human patience. The counterpoint: Shopify just opened its catalog of a billion listings so shoppers can set up agents to buy on their behalf. So the wall goes up one platform at a time. Agent traffic is still tiny on the other end, too. Uber fulfilled only four rides via third-party agents in Q3, and DoorDash did only "several hundred" orders, against 993 million total orders last quarter.