An eBay moderator confirmed on Thursday it’s in the process of rolling out a feature that uses generative AI (artificial intelligence) after some sellers reported seeing it in the wild last week with no announcement.
An eBay seller told EcommerceBytes on May 24th that she clicked on an unlabeled icon when listing an item in the eBay app and it rewrote their entire description – with no undo button.
The seller characterized the new description as “some weird, seemingly AI-generated text,” but was unable to retrieve their original description.
Sellers also buzzed about the feature last week in a thread on the eBay discussion boards. Today (June 1), an eBay moderator responded in the thread with the following post:
“Thank you for raising this issue. And I apologize for the experience you had. We are constantly testing new features to simplify your selling experience, and last week we inadvertently reverted to an older version of the listing flow — it didn’t have the “undo button” and some other important features that significantly improve the Generative AI item description experience. The issue was resolved on the 25th, and the improved experience is being rolled out to sellers over the coming months.”
Note that the moderator edited their post 37 minutes after posting the original response, changing it to read:
“Thank you for raising this issue. And I apologize for the experience you had. We are constantly testing new features to simplify your selling experience, and we regret that there was an issue on this experience for some Android users. The issue was resolved on the 25th, and the improved experience is being rolled out to sellers over the coming months.”
The closest eBay had come to informing sellers of AI testing was a passing reference in a May 3rd post devoted to eBay first-quarter earnings, when the head of eBay US Adam Ireland said, “Many of us have heard of Generative AI, like Chat GPT, which is certainly a hot topic in the news. We’re currently in the process of creating a plug-in that will allow you to auto-generate item descriptions based on content already available across the web. And soon we’ll roll out tests for sellers to pre-populate categories and item specifics from a single photo—so you spend less time creating listings and more on growing and managing your business.”
dumb dumb dumb
The concerning phrase is “content already available across the web is exactly opposite of what a seller might want. Would eBay AI find and use seller-generated listings and seller-defined constraints? Where does AI come in? Would it format descriptions from catalogs, seller templates, seller condition attributes? Could it format descriptions, and fit titles into 80 characters guided by older seller-listings?
While speculative, it is safe to assume that AI recommendations using data from a single account would provide better results than useless eBay recommendations. Limiting scope to a single account would enable sellers to identify important keys like catalog numbers, and condition attributes that influence selling prices. AI could also identify potential pricing errors. A general-purpose AI engine from eBay would be unlikely to find useful correlations unless numeric catalog numbers can be differentiated from prices and other numeri strings that produce so many spurious search results on eBay. Item specifics like color or denomination must be unbounded instead limited to a small list.
Not long ago, eBay recommended changing the color item specific of a “red orange” stamp to “orange” for better “visibility”. Will seller credibility be sacrificed by eBay AI?
“less time on creating listings and more on growing and managing your business.””
You can manage yourself to death if your listing is bad. Just another stupid trend to make every listing the same, every seller the same. The “growing and managing” your business then simply comes to who can offer the lowest price. That’s all there is.