eBay reports significant advancements through AI tools to improve user experiences and expands payment options in 2024.
eBay reported significant advancements in its operations during the year 2024, detailing the extensive integration of artificial intelligence (AI) tools aimed at enhancing the experiences of employees, sellers, and buyers. This information was shared by executives during eBay’s quarterly earnings call held on February 26.
CEO Jamie Iannone highlighted the deployment of eBay’s proprietary large language models (LLMs) as a crucial component of the company’s strategy for the year. “We leveraged our decades of eCommerce data to build our proprietary LLM models from scratch to accomplish specialized eCommerce tasks at greater levels of efficiency,” he stated. The company also pre-trained leading open-source models on its dataset to improve their accuracy in addressing specific use cases prevalent on the platform. By year-end 2024, eBay rolled out numerous customer-facing features powered by LLMs in various areas including search, payments, and marketing.
The introduction of new AI tools has reportedly enhanced productivity in engineering and customer service departments and improved the relevance of search results on eBay’s platform. These features help sellers to generate product listings, improve product imagery, and automate social media posting. For buyers, the improvements facilitate smoother shopping experiences and product discovery.
Looking ahead, eBay announced a collaboration with OpenAI’s Operator, an AI tool capable of browsing the web to help users locate eBay listings. Iannone remarked, “This agentic approach to commerce could create an entirely new channel for discovery and shopping online.” This partnership is expected to increase seller outreach and provide buyers with more access to eBay’s distinctive inventory.
In addition to its AI enhancements, eBay continued to broaden its payment offerings throughout 2024. The expansion of Klarna’s buy now, pay later option to six additional European countries followed a successful initial launch in Germany. eBay also partnered with Riverty to enable buyers in that country to utilize monthly invoices for their purchases. Iannone illustrated the focus on enhancing payment options by stating, “In payments and financial services, we continue to focus on adding new and locally relevant ways to pay on eBay, to expand buyer choice, drive conversion and optimize our payment mix.”
Furthermore, eBay’s recent acquisition of Caramel, a provider of online automotive transaction solutions, aims to strengthen the company’s position in the collectible car market. This acquisition is projected to increase consumer trust in vehicle purchases through the platform and streamline the complexities associated with vehicle sales across all 50 states. Iannone conveyed optimism about the broader implications of this move, highlighting that an improved vehicle transaction experience may yield benefits in other categories, as buyers within the automotive segment tend to spend significantly on parts and accessories as well as non-motor items within the eBay marketplace.
Source: Noah Wire Services
