eBay have laid out their strategy for 2018 and the years ahead and noted the recent eBay AI (Artificial Intelligence) innovations. This is a continuation of their multi-year regeneration program to reimagine the shopping experience, which started in 2015 with the goal of delivering relevant and personalized experiences to eBay customers.
“We have heavily invested in AI across our platform. You can see this powering many of our efforts at scale, including those in personalization and image recognition. We use AI to find patterns and trends across our massive data sets, so we can deliver highly personalized results and help shoppers find the things they really want.
At the heart of the reimagined shopping experience is our structured data effort, which provides insights into more than a billion items on our site. And, when paired with decades of data on the buying preferences of millions of shoppers, it enables us to explore new paths of personalization and inspiration.”
– Mohan Patt, eBay Vice President of Buyer Experience
Recent eBay AI innovations
eBay point to the following innovations in their path to power a better shopping experience. eBay sellers and buyers in the UK may feel a little short changed as many of these are yet to be fully rolled out worldwide and aren’t yet available in Britain.
- New browsing flows and standardized product pages allow users to see relevant items unique to them, based on their shopping behaviour.
- A new discovery-based homepage delivers a highly personalized experience.
- Structured data across eBay Motors category enables you to buy tyres and have them professionally installed in your local area.
- Computer vision makes the entire internet shoppable from your mobile device. Last Autumn in the US, eBay launched Find It On eBay and Image Search on the eBay app, which lets you use pictures to search our marketplace. Whether it’s a photo you snap in the world around you or an image that inspires you on your favourite blog, our AI helps you quickly find the things you love.
- eBay are meeting their customers on their social networks. eBay ShopBot is eBay’s AI-powered personal shopping concierge on Facebook Messenger that helps people find the best deals.
- Through conversational commerce, eBay enabled shoppers in the US and Australia to “Ask eBay” on Google Assistant, so finding the items you want is as easy as asking a friend.
- eBay’s Seller Hub is mobile-friendly, highly customizable and offers real-time recommendations. It arms sellers with meaningful guidance on pricing, restocking and sourcing.
- By revamping the eBay API platform, they have made it easier for developer and seller partners to grow and scale their businesses, giving them the tools to quickly integrate with eBay and onboard all their inventory using retail and industry standard practices.
eBay say that the investments in new technologies and the new model of shopping they are working toward are already making an impact across the business. eBay say that they are seeing an uptick of traffic landing on structured data enabled pages and strong conversion on SEO. And the eBay app has the best reviews in its history.
“The cutting-edge technology that we are investing in will redefine ecommerce. Shopping will be more conversational and personal. When you come to eBay.com or our mobile app, you’ll see a simpler, more intuitive way to shop. We will focus on key areas of our shopping experience, including search, delivery and returns, customer service and payments.
In 2018, we’ll focus our AI capabilities on computer vision, personalization, search and dynamic pricing capabilities for our sellers. AR, VR and mixed reality are becoming viable platforms for development and we will take advantage of their unique capabilities to deliver immersive and engaging buying and selling experiences.”
– Mohan Patt, eBay Vice President of Buyer Experience
With their ambitious plans, it’s no surprise that eBay have just announced the hiring of a eBay have hired a new Chief Scientist, Artificial Intelligence,
3 Responses
It’s worrying when they don’t yet seem to have mastered their existing technology. Do we really need more stuff that half works?
Artifical Intelligence? Of a three year old?
They can’t get the checkout to work properly, the searches to return consistent results, or the site to be fully functional all of the time.
If you transfer items to Ebay from other sites, look at the garbled mess of categories their current “intelligence” asigns to them.
I really doubt customers want this.
Worse still for Ebay, customers don’t want an “experience” at all – they just want to be able to find and buy things quickly and easily.
You don’t need AI for that.
You just need the sort of proper investment in the infrastructure of the site that has been lacking, as profits are creamed off for shareholders.
As someone once said – You can’t polish a turd, but you can roll it in glitter.
lololololol morons. morons with a list.
lets just run down their list of “AI” shall we?
-New browsing flows and standardized product pages (NOT AI)
– A new homepage. (NOT AI)
– you can buy tyres and have them installed. (NOT AI)
– Computer vision makes the entire internet shoppable from your mobile device.
(not AI, a lie, and rather meaningless overall)
– Image Search (NOT AI).
– eBay ShopBot , okay, i’ll give you that one. an embarrasing failure of an attempt at AI.
– “Ask eBay” on Google Assistant (NOT AI)
– “eBay’s Seller Hub arms sellers with meaningful guidance” does it? if you believe that you have less intelligence than ebay AI.
– eBay API (NOT AI)
you know what you sound like blindly regurgatating obvious falsehoods?
you do, because i tell you every time you do it.
why don’t you just claim that Tamebay is the largest, most visited website in history? it’s a blatant lie that everyone sees right through and loses you credibility every time you repeat it, so why not just hammer that one out twice a week? because ebay aren’t paying you to tell that lie i guess? how much is your credibility worth? do you have any left to sell at this point?
this comment box is AI.
potato chips are AI.
the french are all AI.
horses are AI.
calculators are AI.
– there i sound like Tamebay now. moronic and wrong.