There’s a new eBay visual shopping feature on mobile apps that steps in while browsing to find items you might want to buy. Jonathan Chard, Lead Product Manager, Mobile Experience at eBay bills it as “Our newest experience helps you find more products you just can’t describe”.
The idea is if something catches your eye that you quite like but isn’t perfect for you that with a couple of taps you can start exploring similar items that might be perfect. In search and browse, you’ll start to see three dots on the top right corner of the listing and if you tap that it will bring up options to enable you to start exploring similar items.
The new eBay visual shopping feature is essentially a mash up between search filters and computer vision where eBay mines it’s store of images to present similar results in a seamless, intuitive shopping experience. To experience the feature, open the eBay app, search or tap browse to visit a category or interes, then tap on the three dots next to an item you would like to explore. This will pull up a screen that lets you explore a number of options related to the item, including the popular “looks like this” feature.
eBay visual shopping is now live on eBay iOS and Android apps in the US, UK, Germany and Australia. On testing, I’m not seeing it for all searches and it appears more likely to appear in deeper leaf categories than top level categories so you may need to have a play before you find it. Once you are in a search or category where the feature works, the three dots will appear against each listing ready to be tapped.
One Response
I wish ebay would devote some time to getting the basics of a modern day shopping site right before venturing off into new experimental stuff every few days.
Simple stuff like enabling “send a copy invoice”, adding “business/shop name” to the address section, allowing pdf files to be attached to messages, etc… the list could go on and on. All basic, simple fixes.
As much as I like hearing of new developments on ebay, I fear that all the old basic site complaints that cause business sellers problems get brushed under the carpet.