eBay found the way

Behind a lot of AI features you can feel the thirty minute meeting where someone wrote "AI" on the whiteboard and everyone else took turns thinking of places to put a ✨ icon.

But occasionally you bump into something that is just so :chef-kiss: that you can't imagine it working any other way.

As a quick detour ... I read a few months ago that eBay was having a bit of a moment. New management, new focus and a bit of luck when it became the place for some hot collectible (I forget what, maybe Labubus?) which they'd done a great job of leveraging into sustained growth.

So for the first time in years, I jumped over to ebay dot com to see what was going on. The first thing I noticed was that selling fees were gone. I knew I had a bunch of stuff that:

1. I never use.
2. Is too good to throw away.
3. Isn't valuable enough to deal with people on Gumtree¹ who are very eager to know if your item is still for sale, but not actually buy it. Or will buy it but only for $3 and half a sandwich.

So, I've been cleaning up and selling some stuff. A few days ago when I tapped "List for free" (they really want you to know it's free now) my camera was open. To be honest I was looking for a way to close it because I thought it was going to be a typically undercooked AI slop feature ... but reader ... I was so wrong! I should add - I don't even know if this has been around for ages and I just discovered it, but I asked a frequent eBayer I know and they hadn't seen it before.

The funny thing is, while I took a bunch of screenshots to show you how it works ... you just have to imagine exactly how you would want this to work. That's how it works!

You take the first photo of whatever you're selling:

Then, I guess, having worked out already what this is, it asks for a photo of the back to "show buyers the features" (and I wondered, to read the barcode?):

I seem to have misplaced (or got too excited to take) the rest of my screenshots but it went on to suggest a photo of the inside that showed the disk and game booklet then a photo of the underside of the disk to show its condition (i.e. that it's not scratched). Simple/obvious things to do I guess but it was really helpful - I hadn't actually thought of doing one of the back of the disk.

Anyway, you take whatever other photos you want to take (it tells you it will prep the ad in the background while you do that) and then move on to selecting the condition:

And then (I guess they really still couldn't resist the sparkles) you're done:

With basically no effort other than taking the photos it asked for, I now have an eBay listing:

The most interesting thing to me, and maybe you too if you spend your days talking to increasingly nauseating LLMs, was not just how accurate it was (although this is a pretty easy category of thing to get right I guess) but how short and to the point the description was:

BANDAI NAMCO Project CARS 2 Limited SteelBook w/ Manual (PS4, PAL, G).

Publisher, edition, that it's a steelbook and not a normal case (which I wouldn't have even known to call it), that the manual's still in there, platform, region, classification. It also picked the category, filled in the item specifics, set the condition, and priced it at A$112.51 — which sounds way too much to me and I reduced it - but apparently this is what the last copy on there sold for, which of course they know!

This is where it felt like someone at eBay spent more than 15 minutes at that whiteboard thinking about this. It's not just what it does do, but what it doesn't. They haven't tried to write an AI slop description like I see in places like Carsales² - they just put the facts in and encourage you to add to it later.

And while the pricing is the bit that's most obviously coming from their data (you can click through to see the items it references) obviously this all works because of the mountains of data they have about all of it - photos, descriptions, the conversations buyers and sellers have - and while it's not a novel observation that is what will matter a lot in the AI era, it's one of the most front-and-centre examples I've seen of it.

Anyway I thought this was worth writing about as a really nice AI feature implementation (or is it just machine learning 😝), one that actually feels like it started with someone asking "what is the biggest pain-point our users have and how could this new technology make it better?" ... This makes it way easier for me as a seller, and I think better for a buyer as well - a buyer who gets a more detailed listing than I could ever be bothered filling in, and a photo of that shiny disk!

I should add, the old way this worked was actually not too bad, you could start with search and picked out that you were selling the same thing (again, using all their data to help you) but I found sometimes I wouldn't search for the right thing or the listing I picked didn't seem to have all the fields I needed filled in - that never happens now.

Also, the lightly conversational tone of the guidance you get and it still feeling a bit magic that you can just take a photo of something and a computer knows exactly what it is³ results in something that, like I said earlier, just works exactly how you would want it to work. At least for now, early into the era, that still makes it feel delightful. I guess it won't be long before everything that isn't this easy feels like more effort than it's worth.

Nice job eBay.

1. For non-Australian readers: Gumtree is like Facebook Marketplace, but worse ... and now that I think of it, it got bought by eBay years ago too I think? ↩
2. While the rest of the world is addicted to TikTok, this is where I spend between 1 to 27 hours per day instead. ↩
3. I know this is not new, you can just open your camera and point it at stuff to get a description of what you're looking at ... but when the fuck do you ever want to do that? Almost never! You know when you do though, when you're selling something on eBay! ↩