As we’ve said before, and as Chris spoke about at Internet Retailing Expo a few weeks ago, structured data is a really important trend for ecommerce sellers right now.
And it looks like eBay has made a strategic investment in a relevant firm along those lines by buying Expertmaker.
As they say on their website: “Today, eBay announced it has agreed to acquire Sweden-based Expertmaker, which specializes in providing intelligent solutions powered by artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and big data analytics. Expertmaker has been a partner of eBay’s since 2010, most recently helping with eBay’s structured data initiative. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Upon the close of the transaction, Expertmaker’s employees will join eBay’s structured data product and technology team. Expertmaker’s Founder and CEO, Lars Hard, will join as Director, Data Science reporting into Amit Menipaz’s organisation.”
eBay says of the buy: “eBay remains focused on driving the best choice, the most relevance and the most powerful selling platform for its customers. One component of eBay’s strategy to drive the most relevance is its shift to be more product-based. With this initiative, which eBay calls structured data, the company is organizing its vast inventory in order to better aggregate insights into supply and demand. This structured data foundation will allow eBay to build better user experiences and improve discoverability.
With over 900 million listings on eBay, there are three key efforts that comprise eBay’s structured data initiative: collect the data; process and enrich the data; and create product experiences. Expertmaker will contribute to data processing and enrichment, specifically with respect to product attribute normalisation.”
And eBay has also published this graphic to help understand their approach:
2 Responses
Good of ebay to put its insights in the public domain for marketplace competitors to use. Is it no wonder that Amazon and others are growing at a faster rate. Who needs an inside mole when you have ebay as your competition? On the other hand it is all basic stuff and after 20 odd years of offering a marketplace you would have thought that ebay would have grasped these concepts by now!
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