AI shopping agent being tested by eBay.

[blackcatbooksuk]

Just saw something on CNBC regarding AI on eBay. I think it may have been refering to this ...

"AI shopping agent: A feature currently in testing that provides personalized product recommendations and guidance to shoppers"

Will be interesting if this will be in some way monitized along the lines of prompted listing. Pay to have a higher chance of the AI recommending your product. One thing for sure is these companies will need a return on their investments in AI.

Let's see how this plays out.

[the_book_seekers]

I've just read this on the CNN website. It's part of a wider article on ebay and AI.

AI for buyers

The ability to find super specific items with ease on eBay has always been somewhat of a rarefied skill. Around 70% of transactions on the site come from enthusiasts who “know how to search and shop the platform like crazy,” according to Iannone.

Iannone is betting a new AI shopping agent will make it easier for new or less frequent customers to find exactly what they’re looking for. With the “eBay.ai” tool, customers can describe what they’re looking for in natural language and the bot will recommend products based on the conversation.

AI tools like these that make it easier for people to list or buy products could give eBay an advantage, especially since its reputation for offering collectible and budget items helps set it apart from big-box retailers, Canaves said.

“Their product mix is very distinct and unique and that creates challenges for them in terms of the range of sellers and the product mix that they have, and it also creates opportunities for AI tools to help improve their business,” she said.

The shopping tool is currently available only to a small percentage of customers and eBay has not yet disclosed when it will be widely accessible. In the meantime, it’s up against live offerings from competitors such as Google and OpenAI, and AI shopping upstarts like Daydream, that are enabling customers to shop via chatbot.

The trial must be running on .com at the moment. What I'd say about it is ebay messed up the sites search engine and the CEO seems to admit that not everybody knows how to use it to find what they want.  So now they want to introduce an AI backed search - why not sort out the problems with the current search engine.

It will be interesting to see where this goes. 

[moonlight-rhapsody]

`'Iannone is betting a new AI shopping agent will make it easier for new or less frequent customers to find exactly what they’re looking for. 

I've got no trust in what ebay tell us ever since they told us that they were launching the most complicated fulfilment system ever devised as Simple Delivery.

With the “eBay.ai” tool, customers can describe what they’re looking for in natural language and the bot will recommend products based on the conversation.`'

Yeah, right.  More likely that the bot will "recommend products" based on which sellers are paying the most.

And in any case, I don't want AI or ebay deciding what *I* want to see.  They're b...... control freaks 😡

"What I'd say about it is ebay messed up the sites search engine and the CEO seems to admit that not everybody knows how to use it to find what they want. So now they want to introduce an AI backed search - why not sort out the problems with the current search engine."

Exactly.  

[theelench]

More exiting new hocus pocus.  I agree with you.  All they need to do is search for what buyers write in the search box without all the bias that ebay adds with PL.

Take out PL, Default Search and Best Match and search for what buyers write and the search might just work properly.  The more layers of ebay intervention between shoppers and search results the worse they become.

[thesmokingrunner]

@blackcatbooksuk 

"...a return on their investments in AI"?

From what I've seen of eBay's Artificial Idiot I don't think they've invested more than $10 and a McDonald's coupon. Goodness knows what sort of rubbish it will recommend when it starts providing "guidance" for shoppers.

[valueaddedresource]

That article is the perfect example of what you get when a "journalist" simply regurgitates corporate press releases and carefully crafted statements from CEO communications assistants instead of actually doing any research or trying things out for themselves. 😂

The shopping agent they are talking about is this feature eBay announced back in May that is still only available in the app to an extremely tiny percentage of US sellers - it's nowhere near the level of game changing "magical" innovation that article might make someone believe.

https://innovation.ebayinc.com/stories/ebay-uses-agentic-ai-to-supercharge-personalized-ecommerce/ 

[davidninetynine]

If it works as well as the Artificial Insanity nonsense that appears in a lot of sellers' listing descriptions, it will probably finish off ebay once and for all. Which will be a well-deserved outcome...