🚀NEW COURSEVibe Coding AI Apps with Claude Code 🤖✨Enroll now
← All papers  /  Sep 1 – Sep 1, 2026
Agents · Evaluation

E-Commerce Bench: Evaluating LLM Agents on Long-Horizon Autonomous Business Operation

First page
E-Commerce Bench: Evaluating LLM Agents on Long-Horizon Autonomous Business Operation
The curator’s take

Wei Fan and colleagues (Qwen team) release E-Commerce Bench, a 365-day simulated business where an agent runs multiple stores through negotiation, shocks and cash-flow management, and evaluate 18 frontier models across seven dimensions.

Ask this paper

Key points
01

Long horizon means thousands of steps, not more turns: The environment runs a year-long calendar with promotions, natural disasters and supply-chain shocks that continually reshape demand, so the agent has to keep learning and adapting rather than chaining short tasks.

02

Determinism on both sides of the market: Customer purchases and returns follow a fixed demand model and a negotiation kernel decides supplier pricing and concessions, with an LLM used only to verbalize them. That is what makes a year-long benchmark reproducible.

03

No single model dominates: GPT-5.6 Sol grows the 100,000 stake to 1,431,425 and earns the most, yet ranks 16th of 18 on fraud avoidance and trails Fable5 on operational efficiency. The multi-dimensional scoring is what surfaces that.

04

Open-weight leader learns over the horizon: Qwen3.8-Max-Preview leads open models at 416,252, 38% above GLM 5.2 (high), and shows the strongest learning curve, progressively bargaining suppliers down across repeated orders.

05

Why it matters: Most agent benchmarks cannot distinguish a model that wins by being aggressive from one that wins by being competent. Seven dimensions including fraud avoidance is a serious attempt at that separation.

Abstract

Long-horizon agentic tasks go beyond chaining short tasks over more interaction turns. Their evolving dynamic environments and long-range dependencies require Large Language Models (LLMs) to continually explore, learn from experience, and adapt their policies over thousands of steps. We introduce E-Commerce Bench, the first open-source benchmark that integrates multi-round counterpart negotiation and dynamic events into a year-long business operation. Over a 365-day year, an LLM agent concurrently runs multiple online stores, researching the market, negotiating with suppliers to source inventory, optimizing sales strategies, fulfilling orders, handling returns, and managing cash flow to maximize its end-of-year total assets. To construct a realistic merchant-side operating environment, the product and supplier data are derived from a real e-commerce platform, while a year-long calendar of promotions, natural disasters, and supply-chain shocks continually reshapes demand. For reproducibility, both sides of the market are deterministic: customer purchases and returns follow a fixed demand model, while a negotiation kernel determines supplier pricing, concessions, and decisions, with an LLM used only to verbalize them. We evaluate 18 frontier models across seven dimensions, including year-end assets, and find that no single model dominates. GPT-5.6 Sol earns the most, growing the 100,000 opening stake into 1,431,425, yet it ranks 16th of 18 on fraud avoidance and trails Fable5 in operational efficiency. Among open-weight models, Qwen3.8-Max-Preview leads with 416,252, 38% above GLM 5.2 (high), and achieves the strongest learning over the horizon, progressively bargaining down prices across repeated orders. Our code is available at https://github.com/QwenLM/E-CommerceBench.

Every Monday
Get next week’s papers.
Subscribe on Substack