eBay have been talking big about artificial intelligence and machine learning for several years and now one of the most visible results of their behind the scenes projects has been announced – Find It On eBay and Image Search will be going live this Autumn offering new ways to buy on eBay.
This also lends some urgency to those sellers who still have poor quality images on eBay or are flouting the rules with superfluous decorations and text on their product shots. For this technology to work for you, you’ll want your images to be clearly displayed on a contrasting (preferably white) background and to fill the frame.
Find It On eBay
Find It On eBay is a new feature coming to the eBay app and mobile platform that lets you share images from any social platform or web browser. All you have to do is “share” the image with eBay and their mobile app will find listings of the item in that image or others like it.
Image Search
With Image Search, you can take a photo of something you want to buy (or use an existing photo from your camera roll) and put it into the eBay Search bar on eBay native apps. Then, eBay will show you listings that match the item you are looking for.
These features sift through the more than 1.1 billion listings on eBay, creating a seamless shopping experience to help you find the perfect item that you’re looking for. They also open up new ways to discover unique and fun items that wouldn’t be possible with just using words.
When you upload images to run Find It On eBay and Image Search, we use a deep learning model called a convolutional neural network to process the images. The output of the model gives us a representation of the your image that we can use to compare to the images of the live listings on eBay. Then, we rank the items based on visual similarity and use our open-source Kubernetes platform to quickly bring these results to you, wherever you are in the world.
– eBay
Both Find It On eBay and Image Search will be available this coming Autumn. At the time of launch, Image Search will be supported on both Android and iOS and Find It On eBay on Android.
6 Responses
That’s great and everything but surely the more pressing matter, particularly for custom item sellers is the need for improved messaging with image and other file-type support.
All well and good…. but as with every other systems that ebay have rolled out i no doubt expect it to be riddled with flaws. Hell, they can’t even get the standard search system to work properly after all these years.
I expect lists of thouasands of matches…. of which only a handful will actually be relevent. Yes i know im being negative, but after 10 years on ebay, it’s kind of the first stop on the ‘ebay new idea’ bus tour!
Just to add my recent experience,I’d received a suspension for giving out contact details but was allowed to trade again after contacting eBay support so we were now ultra careful about what we said in messages to avoid another suspension.Then this week a buyer asks about an engine we had listed and we replied if you hit buy it now we can remove the engine and send you a PayPal invoice for the deposit.The potential buyer then asked another question about the item,we replied and also confirmed the amount of deposit as we hadn’t mentioned that in the first message.We have now been stopped from selling permanently.The reason they have given is for trying to do a deal outside of eBay even though we told the potential buyer to hit buy it now and we hadn’t given out any contact details to enable us to do it anyway.We initially tried to get them to see sense,that we were trying to play by the rules,but they weren’t listening so we’ve decided to jack it in as it isn’t worth the hassle.
Shame that with this artificial intelligence expertise, they can’t use it on their own message system to see where buyer repeatedly and fraudulently claim non-receipt on all their purchases on ebay. Surely if they scan images then scanning message would be a doddle?????
We usually find those who complain , return items or leave negative have a string of negatives they have left for other sellers , we had one a few months back with 16 negatives in one month when I complained to eBay I was told this buyer is on sanctions and could only purchase items under £30 ! little use to us as he spent £3.25 on a roll of tape and duly left a negative.