If you thought that eBay was the place you went to just to sell off that laserdisc collection you haven’t watched for ten years, it turns out you’re only part right. Far from tagging itself as something catchy like ‘the biggest yard sale on the Internet’ (go ahead, eBay, you can use it), it now decides that it really wants to join the cool kids and get into this whole machine learning stuff. It has acquired a company called SalesPredict (you’ll never guess what they do!) for the catchy figure of ‘an undisclosed sum’.
So why is eBay doing this? Well, according to venturebeat it is to improve their artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science efforts. Presumably what this means in normal speak is that the SalesPredict technology will help analyse the millions of sales made on eBay every day and improve the figure.
It seems an odd path for them to tread given that the very nature of eBay is one that is community led and therefore not guaranteed error-free. That said, eBay’s very size doubtless provides a de facto guarantee of availability for a great many products. Hard to imagine that if you wanted to buy a toaster you would be unable to find one (for the record, there were 3,692 at the time of writing).
Here is what the former head of SalesPredict – now head of project management for technology for eBay – had to say on its role within the auction juggernaut: “we will help arm eBay sellers with more information about the value of items, ultimately helping to increase customer sales conversions.”
That seems a bit of a smokescreen for what they will actually be doing, given that eBay already offers you historical price guides and price suggestions when you use it to sell an item. The fact that they bought another AI startup, ExpertMaker, back in May suggests that machine learning lies at the heart of this play.
Even if this is acquisition for the sake of acquisition, aimed as much at keeping the shareholders happy as actually generating improvements, it could be the herald of a greater sense of sophistication to the eBay selling platform.