A day after making it free for its casual sellers to sell fashion items in the UK, eBay announced a tool to help shoppers find outfits with the help of Artificial Intelligence. On mobile devices, shoppers can “shop the look” to find fashion ideas that eBay personalizes using generative-AI. eBay explained the concept in part:
“Shop the look is an immersive carousel of looks, tailored to our customers’ shopping history, complete with interactive hotspots that reveal similar items and outfit inspirations. Imagine being greeted with a curation of outfits made of new and pre-owned apparel and luxury items that speak to your style preferences.
“We designed shop the look to evolve with the tastes of our customers by taking cues from their shopping habits. Their style recommendations are made up of images and items that are personalized, ensuring a tailored fashion experience. With this approach, we offer a shopping experience that not only understands our customers’ preferences, but also evolves with them over time. eBay is uniquely set up to create this kind of experience because we have decades of data and customer insights and billions of images that we can use to enrich our AI technology and create personalized, magical experiences for our customers.”
eBay has been trying to use technology to enhance the shopping experience for years – in 2017, it used image recognition technology in a marketing campaign tied to Fashion Week, creating a landing page that featured fashion sketches where buyers could “shop the Look.”
In 2019, we reported on eBay “shop the look” patent in which it explained, “Ecommerce systems typically sell hundred, thousands, or even millions of items to users. In light of so many choices, it can be difficult for a user to locate items that may interest him or herself.”
It’s no surprise eBay expanded beyond image-recognition technology to using generative AI, and in this week’s announcement, eBay explained, “Shop the look is now available in iOS for our US and UK customers, with Android coming later this year.
“Shoppers who have viewed at least 10 fashion items in the past 180 days will find this feature both on the eBay homepage and fashion landing page.”
eBay plans to expand the feature to other categories beyond fashion. “Our goal is to continuously enhance the feature with new personalization elements over the next year,” it told shoppers.
Etsy has its own AI-powered shopping feature, as Pymnts.com pointed out in its coverage of today’s news. Gift Mode is “an interactive hub for gifting that combines AI and human curation to help shoppers find the perfect present,” which Etsy launched in January.
Feel free to comment below on what AI-powered shopping features you’re encountering.
