eBay is banning AI shopping bots. Amazon is suing them. Google just shipped live checkout through them. The platforms that built e-commerce are scrambling to avoid becoming back-end infrastructure nobody sees.

On February 20, eBay will update its user agreement to explicitly ban "buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end flow that attempts to place orders without human review." The language is precise. The fear is obvious.

The same week, Google made agentic commerce real. Its Universal Commerce Protocol is now live in the United States, letting shoppers buy from Etsy and Wayfair directly inside Google's AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app. Shopify, Target, and Walmart are next.

One company is building walls. The other is building rails around them.

The argument is simple, and that is what makes it dangerous for incumbents.

"You can look at what ChatGPT and Google are trying to do as kind of like opening the doors for an LLM to act as the marketplace," Adam Behrens, CEO of New Generation and a former Stripe executive, told Retail Dive. "If you just connect supply into that language model and then a consumer interacts with it, why do you ever need to go to Amazon?"

In that model, the traditional e-commerce marketplace "just becomes the back-end fulfilment."

The numbers suggest this is not a fringe scenario. Morgan Stanley projects agentic shopping will reach $190 billion to $385 billion in U.S. e-commerce spending by 2030. McKinsey estimates orchestration revenue from agentic commerce in U.S. B2C retail alone could reach up to $1 trillion by the same date.

The two largest online marketplaces in the world are responding with legal force, not just product strategy.

Amazon sued Perplexity AI in federal court in San Francisco, seeking an injunction to stop the AI firm's agentic shopping tool, Comet, from accessing the retail store and customer data. Amazon is also pushing consumers towards Rufus, its own AI shopping assistant, keeping the agentic layer inside its ecosystem rather than letting a third party sit on top of it.

eBay took a different approach: a blanket ban. Its updated user agreement, effective February 20, prohibits any agentic commerce tool from placing orders without human review. At the same time, eBay is building its own in-house large language models (LLMs), as CEO Jamie Iannone noted during the company's most recent earnings call.

The pattern is clear. Both are saying the same thing: if an AI agent is going to shop on our platform, it will be our agent, running on our terms.

While the incumbents litigate and legislate, the disruptors are building live infrastructure.

Google's Universal Commerce Protocol went live this week with Etsy and Wayfair. "In 2026, agentic commerce is no longer just a concept, it's reality," Vidhya Srinivasan, VP and General Manager of Ads and Commerce at Google, said in the announcement. Hundreds of tech companies, payments partners, and retailers have expressed interest in integrating the standard. UCP is compatible with A2A (Agent-to-Agent), Agent Payments Protocol, and Model Context Protocol, the emerging plumbing of agentic commerce.

Coinbase launched Agentic Wallets the same day, giving AI agents autonomous spending, earning, and trading capabilities. More than 50 million transactions have already been processed through their x402 protocol.

OpenAI is upgrading its Responses API with features built specifically for long-running agents that can access the internet and load reusable skill packages on demand. The infrastructure for agents that shop for hours, not seconds, is being built now.

As we covered in our analysis of the AI checkout wars, every major AI platform wants to own the checkout. This week, Google started winning that race.

The disruption does not just threaten marketplaces. It threatens every merchant that relies on them.

Jeff Otto, CMO of Riskified, told Retail Dive that agentic commerce creates a "double-edged threat." On one side, merchants lose the customer relationship. Brand exposure, loyalty, customer lifetime value: all of it disappears when the transaction happens inside a ChatGPT interface. On the other, merchants take on more fraud risk by "effectively outsourcing" payment-trust decisions to systems outside their control.

"You're kind of losing on both sides," Otto said.

The scale of the shift is hard to overstate. Kartik Hosanagar, a professor at the Wharton School, told Retail Dive that agentic commerce will "shake up retail just like the internet did."

Nearly one in three website visits now comes from AI agents and bots, according to WP Engine's 2025 Website Traffic Trends Report. Retail sites are already serving a dual audience: human shoppers and the AI agents that influence them. As Total Retail reports, most retailer checkouts are not built for non-human customers, and the ones that adapt fastest will capture disproportionate share of agent-to-agent commerce.

The marketplace will not disappear overnight. Amazon still controls roughly 40 percent of U.S. e-commerce. eBay still moves $73 billion in gross merchandise volume annually. Inertia is powerful.

But the value is shifting. When an AI agent can compare prices across every retailer in seconds, negotiate terms, and complete checkout without ever loading a marketplace homepage, the competitive advantage moves from discovery to fulfilment. The platform that curated your choices matters less when the model already knows what you want.

The winners will be the companies that build the rails: the protocols, the payment infrastructure, the identity layers that agents need to transact. Google's UCP, Coinbase's Agentic Wallets, and OpenAI's agent APIs are bets on that future. The losers will be the platforms that try to ban their way out of a structural shift.

eBay's February 20 user agreement update is a line in the sand. It is also an admission. You do not ban something you are not afraid of.

If AI agents can buy anything, from anywhere, without ever visiting a marketplace, what exactly are Amazon and eBay selling?