Artificial intelligence has been front and center for eBay in 2025, showing up in eBay earnings results as the online marketplace’s leadership spotlights how AI use cases can help the company to remain competitive.
In some cases, eBay has even shared metrics to demonstrate AI’s recent impact as it worked to boost revenue growth. In some cases, such as eBay’s early tests in agentic commerce, the full scope of the marketplace’s ambitions remains unknown to the public. However, in the cases of tools that eBay has already introduced to its sellers and buyers, its goals are clearer.
So, what does a more efficient and intuitive eBay that is powered by AI look like? Here are a few things we know.
What eBay is doing with agentic AI
Agentic AI, which is distinguished by the use of software to autonomously execute tasks on behalf of users, can appear in agentic commerce contexts, acting as a personal shopper, as well as team-facing operational capacities. In eBay’s case, the company is using the technology for both purposes.
“Relative to agentic commerce, we think AI represents a really significant opportunity for us because the technology can really accelerate personalization and relevance for our customers,” Iannone said on eBay’s July 30 call. “And we have a multipronged strategy to ensure that we continue to thrive as our agents become more pervasive, really remaining a destination for enthusiast by doubling down on the breadth and depth of non-new and seasoned inventory we have, investing in specialized experiences for key verticals and focusing on kind of continued innovation in new community experiences like eBay Live.”
Currently, eBay is testing an AI shopping agent, which it announced in May. The company claims it can deliver “real-time, hyper-personalized product recommendations and expert guidance based on users’ shopping preferences.” So far, the agent is in use on a limited basis, though eBay expects to expand availability over time.
Iannone said on July 30 that he was “excited by the work that we’re doing on our own agentic capabilities on platform” as testing continues.
“We’ve got other specialized agents across the experience,” he stated. He noted that “ultimately, we believe our scale, our unique inventory and our differentiated value proposition as well as accelerating our own AI capabilities position us extremely well to thrive in an agentic commerce future.”
OpenAI shared early details about its Operator agent and ecommerce ambitions in January. At the time, the tech company named eBay among its first partners. Others included Etsy and Instacart.
In addition, eBay is figuring out how to use agentic AI internally.
“We continue to use agent technology across our marketing, across our customer support, et cetera, to really drive efficiencies in how we work,” Iannone stated in April.
AI use in eBay’s marketing operations
Marketing is one area where eBay is already seeing benefits from its AI use, according to Iannone.
“I would say overall, our marketing ROI [return on investment] has been healthy year-to-date, but nothing really to call out other than in addition to the dynamics of the marketplace, we’re continuing to find ways to use AI for our marketing as well,” he said in April. “So, we’re starting to incorporate AI into CRM [customer relationship management] and how we’re communicating with our customers in a completely different way.”
The results have meant cost savings and more efficient use of resources.
“We’re also leveraging generative AI to drive personalized engagement with our customers,” Iannone said on the July 30 call. “In late 2024, we introduced AI-generated subject lines and pre-headers for personalized CRM emails in the U.S., which drove a greater than 40% increase in quality visits versus our prior approach.”
On the same call, he said these efforts have extended to how eBay generated paid listing ads (PLAs) for Google. Early results produced “higher-quality AI-generated alternatives,” he said. That effort has “increased the acceptance rate on these listings and shown a significant lift to GMV.”
He said other efforts in recent months included “leveraging Gen AI to optimize listing titles in our product listing ads syndicated to Google, resulting in measurably higher quality scores, ranking and overall performance for these listings, leading to incremental GMV.”
Tools for eBay sellers, as well as buyers
In the meantime, eBay has launched a variety of tools publicly for both sellers and buyers who use its marketplace. These tools include generative AI for listing creation, as well as Shop the Look for potential buyers.
One of its latest launches is a generative AI video tool. U.S. sellers can use the tool to generate short-form videos from their listings. In practice, the video format is designed to be shared on social platforms such as YouTube and TikTok.
“At the end of Q1, we rolled out a simplified AI-powered listing flow to all C2C sellers in the U.S., U.K. and Germany, which integrates our magical listing technology and product knowledge graph,” Iannone said in April. “Sellers now start their listing with photos and a title, and we leveraged generative AI to identify the exact product in our catalog or filling relevant item aspects wherever possible, including the description.”
The CEO said customer satisfaction rates exceeded 90% where the listing workflow was being used. Iannone said the impact was time savings for both sellers and shoppers interacting with the listings. Moreover, at least 10 million unique sellers had used the listing options as of April. In doing so, they created more than 200 million listings, Iannone shared. He assessed that those listings accounted for “several billion dollars” of gross merchandise value (GMV).
Meanwhile, Shop the Look uses AI to personalize visual recommendations to shoppers. The personalizations are based on listings that they have previously viewed, automatically curating a carousel experience of similar-looking products.
“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,” explained Raul Romero, a product manager at eBay, when it introduced the feature in 2024.
Unsurprisingly, the underlying goal for Shop the Look mirrored eBay’s other AI aspirations. In this case, that means “reducing barriers and empowering users to buy — and sell!” Romero wrote.
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