Negotiation, a time-consuming process, necessitates empathy to resolve conflicts and reach agreements. While AI-based automated agents gain prevalence in e-commerce, our understanding of how the evolution of empathic agents could function in human-to-agent negotiation is still lacking. Motivated thus, this study, drawing on social response theory and empathy literature, develops a research model to investigate how the user-perceived negotiation agent’s empathic capability could influence their continuous use intention. The research model is tested with subjective (i.e., survey) data collected through a novel, self-developed e-commerce negotiation platform with an empathic agent. Our results show that the perceived agent’s empathic capability positively influences users’ trust and satisfaction towards the agent, further impacting their continuous use intention. Notably, users’ perceived control over the negotiation moderates the relationship between the perceived empathic capability and trust. This study contributes to the research on automated negotiation agents and empathy, offering practical implications for designing negotiation agents.