If you’re lucky enough to have been selected, you may have noticed a new icon on the eBay App when you are creating the description for an eBay listing – it’s eBay’s new Generative AI description generator which has been unleashed into the wild in Beta on the Android App.
eBay’s Generative AI description generator comes with a downside… if you click the button it will overwrite any description you’ve already written, so copy your existing text to your clipboard in case you need to revert.
In eBay’s Q1 2023 earnings call, eBay CEO Jamie Iannone gave a heads up that eBay was working on integrating ChatGPT generative AI functionality into the listing flow. The aim is to help you with creating item specifics and descriptions, and it looks like this has moved into the beta test phase.
Over the coming quarters you’ll see us testing new experiences harnessing our improved visual and contextual understanding of product images to assist our sellers in the listing process. For instance, sellers will soon be able to pre-populate categories and item specifics from a single photo enabling them to spend less of their time inputting inventory and more on growing and managing their businesses.
– Jamie Iannone, CEO, eBay
All you need to is to start typing in your description – no need to worry about grammar and bullet points are fine. Then click the magic button and your description will be expanded with additional detail added.
Early feedback from sellers appears to be mixed with plenty of complaints that they don’t like the descriptions generated… but that’s par for the course for eBay. What we’re more interested in is hearing from serious eBay businesses and whether they stick with their current listing flows or if they start using the eBay App to tweak their listings.
Many larger businesses will use multichannel management software to create their listings on eBay in bulk, so the eBay App will be alien to them. Typically, descriptions will be held in a retailer’s database in bullet point form and inserted on the fly into listings as they are created. Will turning these bullet points into more flowery prose result in a better sell through rate? That’s yet to be proven and we’ll only be able to tell when a business with access to the app does some serious A-B testing to measure the effectiveness of the eBay Generative AI Description Generator.
3 Responses
What is the point of a fancy description when the app hides it from buyers?
Exactly.
Also, what is the point – if listings are hidden anyway? Even when the title have all the words – in the same order – as the search phrase?
They should rather fix current problems – instead of creating new ones…
Whats the point of a good description when all the sellers are chinese ?