Maximizing Customer Experience: Leveraging AI on eBay

0:00So the news here is that eBay has unveiled a new artificial intelligence feature that aims to essentially simplify the listing process for sellers on their marketplace. And essentially, the tool initially launched on iOS on their iOS app. And it's gonna be available on Android, I think in the near future, but essentially just using a photo of a product, the AI tool automatically generates a title description, product release date and even suggest appropriate categories, subcategories, listing price and shipping costs. This is really, really awesome. And I think it just gets to the point of, you know, you're using AI to essentially fill in a lot of the manual grunt work that was just never that fun to do.

0:39So you can imagine to now post something on eBay, you essentially just take a picture of something and it's going to fill out all the information, including the product description and details. This is really interesting. I think about, you know, with higher ticket items, you're less likely to do this, I feel like because a lot of people are, you know, they want to do their own custom stuff. But for a lot of small things like a mouse or a laptop that it's just like it's just an HP laptop and it's standard and it works, like you just want to just list, you don't want to have to write a description for that.

1:09It's kind of interesting. I think the like epitome of the opposite of this, I don't know if you've seen these. And of course, AI is really good at this. But like, if you look at like Zillow home listings, and it's like this luxurious, lavish home, like, you know, the real estate agent like went crazy with like, all the descriptive words they could think of. It's like, you will be dazzled and basked in the light of the bathroom windows. It's just like, I don't know, it's like funny stuff. So obviously, it's probably not going to do that for you. And if you need to like really sell your thing and say why it's the greatest and all of the amazing features of it, you probably want to edit that yourself after the fact, or just do it manually.

1:43But I really do think this is incredible feature a lot of people are going to use. Now, the reason I bring this up is because I think not only is this something that eBay is going to do, but I think everyone is going to start doing this, whether it's a marketplace, whether it's like literally anything that asks for a user input, I think we're going to start seeing the platforms fill in a lot of this stuff with generative AI if it if it doesn't matter, which mostly in most cases, it doesn't. And it kind of also like begs the question, like, why do you need a huge description on like a product listing that is just a working version of that product, people should kind of know about it.

2:15But in any case, I digress there. So I think what's really interesting here is this initiative is part of eBay's kind of ongoing effort to integrate AI into their platform. Recently, I was at the AI for conference, And I heard, you know, the head of AI, eBay, talking about what they're doing here. So they are making a lot of moves. And this is a big area that they are focused on. And of course, you know, eBay already includes AI-powered product category descriptions and a tool for background removal in product photos, right? So they're already integrating AI in a lot of different ways. But an eBay spokesperson kind of talking about all this said, quote, at eBay, we're using AI to reduce friction across the platform and transform the process of listing.

2:56with this tool it makes the seller's job of listing items incredibly painless easy and even fun so i think this is definitely something that ebay is doing but i think a lot of people are doing this and the key word here like they said is you know reducing friction like what can and i think everyone should ask themselves this about their own company in whatever way you know if you have um if you have your customers your buyers like what can you use ai to just reduce friction it doesn't have to revolutionize the product doesn't have to like make it like a thousand times better but just reduce friction, like make it easier.

3:25And you will see like an increased conversion rate on sales and everything is going to, you know, be able to, to, you know, progress and see progress. So I think back in May, Adam Ireland, who leads eBay's US business, he kind of hinted at this development in a blog post, he revealed that eBay plans to release a plugin enabling sellers to auto generate item descriptions using content scraped from the web. Of course, this is all just hooked up to chat GPT. But really addressing what is often described as the hold start problem for newcomers to its marketplace, eBay aims to unveil or really unveil this new tool to alleviate the anxiety first time sellers often experienced due to, you know, it's just kind of like an exhaustive information process that is required to kind of generate some of these listings.

4:14It's like, geez, I just want to sell my freaking camera. It works great. It's, you know, it is what it is. I don't want to fill out a million different boxes and forms. It is kind of ridiculous having to do that when there's technology now that could take that away. So I think the company stated in a blog post, they said, quote, there's no need to work through a cold start with AI. As soon as you're ready to sell, your listing is ready to post. Oh my gosh, that's amazing. So I think the move towards AI hasn't been received entirely positively within the eBay selling community, seller forums, and a bunch of different relevant subreddits like r slash flipping have been populated with complaints about the existing description generators like lack of accuracy and also I guess it can be a little bit wordy sometimes but in any case um like even one user claimed that AI generated descriptions um can be misleading citing a listing for a Pentax SLR camera that said the camera came with a lens kit um so another user um also criticized AI generated descriptions for being too long and often inaccurate so of course there are skeptics there's people that are critical I like that to say I don't think you should just click like generate my thing and then like publish it like you should probably read the thing and like shorten it if it's too long and remove anything if it's wrong this isn't meant to be a starting point it's a lot easier to I'll tell you this right now it is a lot easier to hit the backspace button than to try and think of like four paragraphs off the top of your head like it is what it is so people can criticize like oh it wasn't perfect in the content it generated it's like yeah but it was it saves you so much time if you versus just trying to write that all you could just backspace whatever is not relevant.

5:47And that's on you to like publish bad information. And that's another funny thing, right? They're criticizing it like it's inaccurate. It's like, no, it's not the problem that it's inaccurate. It's the problem that someone posted that without reading it. So the person's inaccurate. They could have copied and pasted it off of a random website because they were too lazy too. Right. So, uh, just people should read the stuff and look at it like a tool that's helping you. Um, and otherwise I think it's great. So, uh, some, you know, skeptics of the AI tool also express some concerns about the reliability of photo recognition algorithms given prevalent biases and some of the leading computer vision technologies.

6:20That's not something I'm super worried about, to be honest. Additionally, I think the AI generated descriptions have been criticized for not being clear or concise enough. You know, like I said, you get it. There's a lot of criticism on this thing, but I think it's at the end of the day, super useful and is going to save a lot of people a lot of time. And that's what I'm all about. So eBay is not alone in the race to incorporate AI into e-commerce functionality. Shopify recently launched an AI generated product descriptions while Amazon has initiated AI generated summaries of reviews. Amazon has even piloted an AI tool that will generate titles, descriptions, and bullet points for selected products based on a list of keywords.

6:59So I think despite all of these strides, eBay's pretty aggressive roadmap right now has kind of had a lot of people who have, you know, kind of questioned the wisdom of adapting AI so extensively, especially given the tools present limitations. And I think this kind of reflects a broader debate in the e-commerce sector about the balance between, you know, automation and quality as platforms kind of aim to attract more sellers and improve search engine discoverability. Overall, I think they're doing a great job, but I'm really interested to continue following this. I'm happy when people are criticized.

7:34I think criticism is good and healthy for the debate. And so I'll be interested to see how they respond to that and what other new AI features they come up with in the future.