Can Students Help eBay Improve Delivery Estimates?

by: Shanna

Bound to be better than their $2/day IT team.

by: COVID-19

Jesús Christ! 🤦🏾‍♂️ It's like eBay's current algorithm isn't bad enough. They have to go and make it worse.

by: Silver Ice King

@Shana

I wish I could agree with you, but I cannot see the students putting in a great amount of effort and learning Ebays' system just to win an internship with Ebay.   Knowing Ebay and how cheap they are this is their work around for having to actually spend some money on quality programmers and it will probably be a free internship where the students do not get paid or they will wind up getting paid off in Wings and all you can drink Friday Nights at Walkers West for their efforts.  

I doubt that many if any at all actually go to work at Ebay when they graduate, unless they also have zero morals and are willing to work for peanuts so the Executives can continue to get their $10 million annual bonuses.  I am sure that for most of the students the internship will be a complete eye opener into how the company works so hard to figure out ways to dip further into the Sellers pockets without being caught!!

by: The End

Too many unknowns.
Too many variables.
Send the buyers to re-education camp.
Leave the kids alone.
Ebay will make them crazy.

by: Snapped

Estimates are one thing.

“Guarantees” are wholly another.  

eBay attempting to ‘improve’ the algorithm for ESTIMATING delivery dates is constructive.  Doing so to support eBay’s ability to ‘guarantee’ a buyer will experience what is estimated, is not constructive.  

Because no matter how much eBay’s ‘confidence’ may increase due to magically IT-hancing delivery estimations, eBay does not CONTROL any of the delivery factors.  Until they do, they have no business claiming to be able to ‘guarantee’ it.  

by: ValueAddedResource

On the topic of GIGO - it looks the the dataset is about 1 million, not 20 million.

From the eBay blog post:

The data set consists of approximately 1 million selected unlabeled public listings. We also provide an Annexure document that describes the columns and parsing logic.

Approximately 25,000 of those listings will be clustered by eBay using human judgment (“true clustering”). These clustered listings will be split into three groups: a) Validation set (approximately 12,500 listings), b) Quiz set (approximately 6,250 listings), c) Test set (approximately 6,250 listings).

The validation set is intended for participants to evaluate their approach. Anonymized identifiers and cluster labels will be provided to the participants. We will release the validation set along with the main dataset.

The quiz data is used for leaderboard scoring. The test set is used as a factor to determine the winner. For the quiz and the test datasets, neither the listing identifiers nor the cluster labels will be provided to the participants.

by: The End

Ebay is a migraine....
And a cluster.....
obliterate it.

by: pace306

THIS ladies & Gentleman - is yet another example of what a complete waste of time looks like.

Take money, time and effort and waste it trying to figure out "nothing".

eBay doesnt need better "improved delivery estimates", its simply not anywhere (close) to what ever issues eBay thinks it has.

1) What eBay needs is a complete overhaul of its corporate morality code - starting from up on top (aka the Jerky Boys from Walmart) all the way down to idiots like The Grifter and its CS dept. Lieing, cheating, stealing, stalking, harassment and all the other things eBay is TRULY known for - need to end.

eBays reputation is "lower then a snakes belly" and THAT is the reason that people dont trust the company - not delivery estimates.

2) since eBay (even though it steals FVF on shipping) has nothing to do with the actual shipping process itself - it cant control any part of it - and therefore what ever data it has - plays no part in "telling" what can or will happen going forward. Sure you can look at the past and then write a formula and hope that future patterns stay the same (ie the variables are stable) - but thats guessing not machine learning. Its a game for Wall Street to make it look like something is going on - when its NOT.

Its the emperors new clothes all over again.

3) Delivery to my customer isnt even controlled by me - and Im the sender of the item. Its not possible for the criminals in San Jose to have ANY control - so why bother? They arent Amazon (who does have some control - Amazon got USPS to deliver on Sat/Sun - something eBay could not) and they have thier own vehicles .... again something eBay does not.

If I take my item into the PO in the early AM - it gets out on one truck. If I take it early afternoon it leaves on another, if I drop it off late or after 4PM - it leaves the next day. eBay cant know when Im taking it to the PO - sometimes I dont even know - it depends on what errands I have. MAYBE I'll just put it in the mailbox and put the flag up - and it wouldnt get back to the PO until my carrier is done his route.

Plus who controls the sorting center and or which one it gets to. Some are really good, some are notoriously bad, some - store mail in trailers!

When it gets to the local area - how does anyone control when the carrier will get to delivering it. Yes the PO has standards - but they arent written in stone (ask anyone who ships Priority Mail - it DOESNT mean 2 day delivery!)

Theres a thousand variables and they are all subject to change at any time and you are TOTALLY at the whim of many many people - that you DONT know.

Being "Amazon" for package delivery isnt eBays problem - its the people who run it who have crazy ideas - THEY are the problem!

by: terry55

Add USPS to the equation it becomes an unsolvable problem, Maybe use the students to fix ebay glitches seeing their IT is useless. How about adding combine shipping request to ebay's app that we've been asking for over 3 years now

by: The End

"Take money, time and effort and waste it trying to figure out "nothing"."
Ebay is the corporate "Seinfeld".

by: pace306

@the end

personally :) I think its more in the "South Park Underpants Gnomes" category.

step 1) lie to sellers to get them to list items
step 2) ????
Step 3) billions in profit

by: RL15

yea, this will make the postal service do their jobs efficiently

typical fleecebay, get someone to do something for free, and like most other schemes I will do nothing.

by: iheartjacksparrow

Can the people running eBay get any dumber? I don't think Albert Einstein or Srinivasa Ramanujan could figure out when a package was going to be delivered based upon all the variables. There's weather situations to consider, employees out sick, how many packages were accepted that day, if there are postal holidays, etc. You'd need a crystal ball and a psychic to be able to determine every delivery estimate. Can these guys just fix the serious issues sellers are dealing with and not worry about whether their packages can beat the delivery of Amazon's packages (they can't)?

by: Rexford

Perhaps the Boy Scouts can help them with their broken search.  However, if I were the Boy Scouts I would not expect a badge for their efforts.

by: ShortSeller

Why surprised they already use machine learning for a number of customer service functions. Must have run out of H1Bs.  

by: Shanna

@pace

"2) since eBay (even though it steals FVF on shipping) has nothing to do with the actual shipping process itself - it cant control any part of it - and therefore what ever data it has - plays no part in "telling" what can or will happen going forward."

But they do have a part. If you buy your postage through eBay, which I stopped doing years ago, it is part of a very large postage buy from the PO. With Amazon now doing many of their own deliveries, eBay may be the largest buyer of postage out there. When you spend that much with a company, you have leverage.

Amazon used their leverage to get USPS to guarantee their delivery times, deliver on Sundays and holidays, and make AZ packaged priority over all other mail.

Why hasn't eBay's crack shipping team, you know the ones Griff hyped up for working 3 days (3 DAYS!!!!) negotiating the exact same postage rates every one else offers, negotiated the AZ package for eBay. Ebay thinks guranteed 2 day delivery, like AZ offers, will drive more sales. I believe this to be true, so why don't they step up and have that deal with USPS? Heck, it might make more people buy postage through eBay, like 3rd party sellers buy through Amazon. Why am I the only one to think of this?

Ebay makes more money on the postage than they do the FVF for most items, That's why they promote returns, they make double on the postage, screw the FVF!

by: The End

@pace306 :
Like the sound bite of Rasta Man from the Howard Stern Show says. "That's a Good One"   :o)

by: AddyUp

Just as well ask the seller to add their own guestimate when they post the item. It will likely be the most accurate.

by: Ina

The data set is indeed 20 million. I added a link above.

The dataset consists of 20 million randomly selected shipments from transactions on eBay. ... These shipment records will be split into three groups:

Training dataset (15 million records)
Quiz dataset (2.5 million records),
Test dataset (2.5 million records).

by: toolguy

And what's wrong with the USPS estimate?

I would think they have more experience than a group of students.