mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

ShopGym: An Integrated Framework for Realistic Simulation and Scalable Benchmarking of E-Commerce Web Agents

arXiv 2605.16116 ↗First posted 15 May 2026cs.AIcited by 5

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Social simulation and multi-agent debate

Abstract (arXiv)

Developing and evaluating e-commerce web agents requires environments that preserve meaningful task structure while enabling controllable, reproducible, and scalable scientific comparison. Existing methodologies force a tradeoff: live storefronts provide realism but are non-stationary, difficult to inspect, and irreproducible, while hand-built sandbox benchmarks provide control but cover only a narrow range of layouts, catalogs, policies, and interaction patterns. We argue that the core bottleneck is methodological: the field lacks a scalable way to construct evaluation settings that are simultaneously realistic, diverse, controllable, inspectable, and reproducible. We introduce ShopGym, an integrated framework for realistic simulation and scalable benchmarking of e-commerce web agents. ShopGym is a framework for constructing e-commerce simulation environments and grounded benchmark tasks. Its simulation layer, ShopArena, converts live seed storefronts into self-contained sandbox shops through anonymized shop specifications and a staged, validated generation process. On top of these simulated storefronts, ShopGuru synthesizes benchmark tasks across seven skill categories, grounding each task in the shop's catalog, navigation structure, policies, and interaction affordances. Together, ShopArena and ShopGuru produce self-contained, resettable, inspectable, and stable evaluation artifacts that preserve structural properties and agent-evaluation signals relevant to shopping tasks. We validate the framework through graph-based structural analysis and agent-based behavioral evaluation with 224 generated tasks across six sandbox shops: three constructed with synthetic data and three with real data. Our results show that the synthetic shops preserve key structural properties of live storefronts, with agent performance on synthetic shops positively correlated with performance on live storefronts.

Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Social simulation and multi-agent debate, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 26 of its 61 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 15 May 2026.

Builds on

26 of 61 references.

Closest ancestors · 10

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026Shopping Companion: Benchmarking and Training LLM Agents for Long-Horizon Preference-Grounded E-Commerce Tasks16 Mar
  2. 2026ProductResearch: Training E-Commerce Deep Research Agents via Multi-Agent Synthetic Trajectory Distillation27 Feb
  3. 2026SimGym: Traffic-Grounded Browser Agents for Offline A/B Testing in E-Commerce1 Feb
  4. 2026ShopSimulator: Evaluating and Exploring RL-Driven LLM Agent for Shopping Assistants26 Jan
  5. 2025See, Think, Act: Online Shopper Behavior Simulation with VLM Agents22 Oct
  6. 2025Customer-R1: Personalized Simulation of Human Behaviors via RL-based LLM Agent in Online Shopping8 Oct
  7. 2025WebMall -- A Multi-Shop Benchmark for Evaluating Web Agents18 Aug
  8. 2025ShoppingBench: A Real-World Intent-Grounded Shopping Benchmark for LLM-based Agents6 Aug
  9. 2025DeepShop: A Benchmark for Deep Research Shopping Agents3 Jun
  10. 2025Can LLM Agents Simulate Multi-Turn Human Behavior? Evidence from Real Online Customer Behavior Data26 Mar

Other references · 16

  1. 2023Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contextscited by 3,455
  2. 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 2,006
  3. 2022WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agentscited by 1,251
  4. 2023Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Webcited by 1,242
  5. 2025OpenAI GPT-5 System Cardcited by 989
  6. 2024WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Modelscited by 438
  7. 2025An Illusion of Progress? Assessing the Current State of Web Agentscited by 174
  8. 2024The BrowserGym Ecosystem for Web Agent Researchcited by 161
  9. 2025The Illusion of Diminishing Returns: Measuring Long Horizon Execution in LLMscited by 64
  10. 2025Go-Browse: Training Web Agents with Structured Explorationcited by 33
  11. 2025OPeRA: A Dataset of Observation, Persona, Rationale, and Action for Evaluating LLMs on Human Online Shopping Behavior Simulationcited by 28
  12. 2026Gym-Anything: Turn any Software into an Agent Environmentcited by 27
4 more
  1. 2025AgentA/B: Automated and Scalable Web A/BTesting with Interactive LLM Agentscited by 19
  2. 2026Safe and Scalable Web Agent Learning via Recreated Websitescited by 11
  3. 2024LLaSA: Large Language and E-Commerce Shopping Assistantcited by 8
  4. 2026WebForge: Breaking the Realism-Reproducibility-Scalability Trilemma in Browser Agent Benchmarkcited by 5

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 5.

5 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026SimGym: A Framework for A/B Test Simulation in E-Commerce with Traffic-Grounded VLM Agents
  2. 2026AgenticShop: Benchmarking Agentic Product Curation for Personalized Web Shopping
  3. 2026EComAgentBench: Benchmarking Shopping Agents on Long-Horizon Tasks with Distributed Hidden Intent
  4. 2026MerchantBench: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Long-Term Coherence in E-Commerce Operations
  5. 2025REAL: Benchmarking Autonomous Agents on Deterministic Simulations of Real Websites
  6. 2026RealWorldShop: Benchmarking and Improving Conversational Shopping Agents in Real-World E-commerce
  7. 2026Iterating Toward Better Search: A Two-Agent Simulation Framework for Evaluating Agentic Search Architectures in E-Commerce
  8. 2026Odysseys: Benchmarking Web Agents on Realistic Long Horizon Tasks