Another platform launches AI tools to automatically write listings. Will operators lose their jobs?

According to Xiaodi Zhang, eBay's vice president of selling experience, the company has seen the potential of AI for its platform to help solve two key problems: helping shoppers find items faster and easier, and helping sellers upload products more easily.

In early 2023, eBay built a tool based on Open AI's ChatGPT that creates a product description based on data provided by sellers about product category, color, brand, etc. Zhang Xiaodi said it took about a month to develop this feature.

According to eBay, this is a magical product listing tool and it was launched to all sellers selling on its platform in August.

Zhang Xiaodi said that we are "pleasantly surprised" by the positive feedback from sellers . According to data, as of late August, sellers gave the tool a satisfaction rating of 80%, which is one of the highest-rated applications among the new features recently launched by eBay. Some sellers said that after using this tool, the efficiency was greatly reduced, and the company did not even need so many operational positions.

However, Cassie Socha, retail director analyst at research firm Gartner, warned that brands need to inform shoppers when using generative AI. Socha said that according to a recent Gartner survey, many consumers do not trust generative AI.

In a July 2023 Gartner survey of 303 consumers, 34% said they were “very or somewhat bothered” by generative AI in retail, 53% said they believed it would have a strong or somewhat negative impact on society, and 66% said they were concerned about discrimination or bias in generative AI.

However, this has not stopped eBay from advancing AI. In addition to uploading products, EBay is also trialing an artificial intelligence tool that will remove the background of the seller's pictures and replace them with white pictures.

Although many eBay sellers have a professional team to take pictures of their products, there are still quite a few sellers who need this kind of tool. The goal of this tool is to remove the clutter in the seller's photos and help these sellers have a clean product photo.

“Sellers have told us that Background Removal has a dramatic impact on their product conversion rates,” EBay wrote in a press release announcing the tool.

eBay

AI

Seller