Shops may soon refuse to speak to your shopping agent

A draft template of standard trading terms circulated by a retail association would allow a merchant to decline a transaction with an automated buyer that negotiates beyond a defined persistence threshold. The threshold would be set by three measures: the number of counter-offers, the interval between them, and how many times the agent returns to the same item after abandoning the basket.

The reasoning would be unusually candid for a document of this kind. Dynamic pricing was built to face a shopper who gets tired — someone who, after the third refusal, either buys, leaves, or goes to bed. An agent does not get tired, does not go to bed, and does not feel awkward making a twenty-fourth offer. The draft would describe the last of these as “not a technical advantage but a cultural one”.

“We welcome automated customers,” the association's position paper would say. “We ask only that they behave like a patient human being.” The second half of that sentence would be underlined at the request of member firms, who would have read the first half and objected.

The most delicate clause would concern recognition. Legally the terms would not refuse agents; they would refuse behaviour, which means a sufficiently determined person could cross the threshold unaided. A line conceding that the system “does not distinguish between software and an unusually persistent customer” would survive into the final draft, having originally been proposed as a joke.

From the shopper's side all of this would arrive as a polite screen: We are unable to complete this order. No reason would be given, since publishing the threshold would, in the drafters' view, amount to publishing the way around it. An appeal would be possible by telephone, during business hours, with a human — the exact channel the agent had been acquired to avoid.

Consumer submissions would put the asymmetry in one sentence. A store may reprice every few seconds on the basis of what it knows about the visitor; the visitor may not negotiate using software. One is optimisation, the other is abuse, and the difference between them is which side owns the server.

None of this is in force. It is a template, and templates spread through retail the way fog spreads through a valley. The likely outcome would not be that agents are banned but that they are graded, with a compliant, well-mannered, commercially harmless tier of assistant available from the merchants themselves. Yours would still be allowed to shop. It would simply be asked to stop winning.