eBay Magical AI Listing Tool Now Available for Personal/Private Accounts

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Back in September 2023, CEO Jamie Iannone wowed investors with a mocked up demo of the "Magical Listing AI" experience they had been working on in employee beta where, importantly, he claimed the tool would allow sellers to "just take a picture and let AI do the rest."

The demo mockup showed exactly that, no title or any other info needed, you just upload the pic and AI creates a listing in seconds.

Demo: https://vimeo.com/860275682

https://innovation.ebayinc.com/stories/magical-listing-tool-harnesses-the-power-of-ai-to-make-sellin...

A year and a half later, Magical Listing is finally being rolled out to all personal/private selling accounts in US, UK and Germany with plans to expand to business accounts in the future.

https://innovation.ebayinc.com/stories/ebay-reduces-the-time-to-list-on-mobile-with-new-simplified-s...

But the new demo video showing the actual process, not a mockup, shows it doesn't live up to the just take a pic and let AI do the rest promise - you have to enter a picture and a title to even get the AI option to pop up.

https://vimeo.com/1073372520

I took it for a spin myself and had some pretty disappointing results.

First, I tried uploading a picture of my mousepad and typing "turtle mousepad" in the title.

Unfortunately, the Magical Listing experience wasn't able to fill in the category automatically based on that title, so I had to do that manually too - choosing from a few suggestions, including an oddly out of place recommendation to put it in automotive tools and supplies.

It appears eBay's Magical AI is matching mostly on keywords, not the actual image, and only returned suggestions of variation listings - none of which had a variation that would actually match my item.

I tried again, this time changing the title to "turtle mousepad with wrist rest" to give it more context - that at least narrowed it down to single items, but again none of them were a visual match and it apparently just completely ignored the word "turtle."

So then I tried a different item - a Starbucks mug.

And again it appeared to be going more by text context than actual image matching - it brought up a bunch of different Starbucks mugs, but none of them look like the one in the image except of course for the logo.

For comparison, if you take that same image and drop it into Grok with no text context clues about what it is, ask it to identify the item and write an eBay optimized title and description - it correctly identifies it as a white ceramic 16 oz Starbucks tumbler with lid and provides a title and bullet point description all just from the image, exactly as Iannone claimed eBay Magical Listing would do but doesn't.

I'm going to give it some time and go back and see if it gets better but after a year and a half delay, I have to say this experience is definitely not....magical.

Anyone else getting better results?

[jerseyboymusic]

I wasn't aware there were "personal/private" accounts! And, no, I don't use or want to use AI

[jonathanbrightlight]

@jerseyboymusic It's a UK thing primarily.

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@jonathanbrightlight wrote:

@jerseyboymusic It's a UK thing primarily.

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@jerseyboymusic  - @jonathanbrightlight  is right that it's mostly considered a UK thing due to the fact that private sellers there now don't pay selling fees, but buyers pay buyer fees on those transactions, and a host of other recent policy updates and feature changes that apply to private sellers there but not business sellers.

In the US, there is still technically a distinction where your account is either personal or business when you register but for practical purposes it doesn't really matter as much - business accounts may have access to a few different tools but that's about it.

https://www.ebay.com/help/account/account-getting-started/setup-verify?id=4191#section5 

Typically personal accounts are used by smaller consumer to consumer (C2C) sellers who are just reselling some of their own used items, knick knacks from grandma's garage etc. - in theory the benefit of rolling out Magical AI listing to those kind of sellers first should be that they may be less likely to have a lot of in depth knowledge about the items they are selling and/or experience in creating an optimized eBay listing, so just being able to take a picture and let AI do it for you may be more useful to them than an experienced expert seller.

In fact, in Jamie's presentation to investors in 2023, that's how he positioned it, telling a story about finding some old remote in his garage that he no longer had the stereo to match and saying how he could just hold it up, take a picture and AI would magically identify the remote including all compatible units etc.

He said:

The version we showed there is a product that's currently an employee beta, which is, how do I figure out what a product is and do all the hard work so the seller doesn't have to do anything?

And I'll just tell you a story. We're cleaning up my garage with my wife, and she finds this old remote control from a stereo I had 25 years ago. And she's like, "Okay, throw this out. Like, Jamie, we don't have the stereo. It's been 25 years." And I'm like, "Okay, better idea, let me sell it on eBay."

So, I literally just hold up my phone to it, and it figures out what this remote control is, it figures out what stereos it's compatible with, it writes the description for this remote control, and I listed on the platform. It says to price it at $30. I priced it at $30. And guess what, a week-and-a-half later, this remote control sells for $30. That would have absolutely been in the trash without this technology.

In its current version, I don't see how the tool would be that helpful in the situation he described as you'd still need to know enough basic info about the remote to write a title with enough detail for the AI to hopefully find a match.

[chapeau-noir]

I wish Jamie would stop using the word "magical" - it sounds so juvenile.

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@chapeau-noir wrote:

I wish Jamie would stop using the word "magical" - it sounds so juvenile.

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@chapeau-noir at least we haven't had Jordan Sweetnam showing off his muppet collection recently. 😂

I agree though, every time I hear Jamie use that word, it makes me think of this scene from Succession.

[gator08041971]

Personally, I never use Ai for doing things like this.  Its bad enough its used to police the listings. I get why that is done, and sure the automation probably saves a lot of time, but it also is not always correct.

Same goes for your listing.

If you have an Ai doing the listing for you, are you selling it, or is the Ai?  Is the Ai on the hook with the item doesn't match the description?  I doubt that.

I would never want a buyer to think I'm using an Ai generated listing, so I do every single listing myself.  There are parts of the listing that are copied/pasted, the rest is specific to the item.  The sad truth is, this Ai stuff is mostly ignored when you buy from a mobile device, since most of the important data is hidden below links you have to tap.

[chapeau-noir]

At least he doesn't call it "A1" like another not-serious person did...over and over. A-1 sauce had some fun with that in an ad.

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@gator08041971  yep, eBay has lots of disclaimers in their terms and service and other places making it clear the seller is liable for any incorrect info eBay's AI might produce...which also makes it problematic in my opinion that they are targeting this at theoretically less experienced/product-knowledgeable consumer sellers.

If you're an experienced seller in a particular niche, you may spot any errors the AI might make and correct them (though arguably if you know that much about the product already, you're likely going to be writing the listing yourself any way) - but new/casual sellers likely won't even know if the AI is steering them wrong until it's too late.

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@chapeau-noir wrote:

At least he doesn't call it "A1" like another not-serious person did...over and over. A-1 sauce had some fun with that in an ad.

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@chapeau-noir  it probably says something about me that when I saw that clip, my first thought for A1 wasn't steak sauce but some really important thing about free speech. 😂

I'm guessing that person likely knows just as much about that as they do about AI....though I'll stop there to keep this from going too far off topic. 😉

[fm2000]

I used to sell lots of remote controls in the past, especially for vintage AV/Hi-Fi gear. Some of those vintage stereo remotes are completely undocumented and information can't be found about them anywhere online. Even if they have model numbers on them, they don't always turn up in a search (on eBay, Google or anywhere else). Sometimes they don't even have model numbers on them, only a brand. How on earth is this tool easily identify a remote control like that if it is not well documented, much less fill in valid item specifics or know what equipment it is compatible with? Unless there is a robust and through remote control database of some kind in the future, the odds of that working correctly are very slim.

They didn't even address the issue of correctly testing and cleaning remotes, which can take far more time than writing a basic description oneself.

[chapeau-noir]

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@fm2000 wrote:

I used to sell lots of remote controls in the past, especially for vintage AV/Hi-Fi gear. Some of those vintage stereo remotes are completely undocumented and information can't be found about them anywhere online. Even if they have model numbers on them, they don't always turn up in a search (on eBay, Google or anywhere else). Sometimes they don't even have model numbers on them, only a brand. How on earth is this tool easily identify a remote control like that if it is not well documented, much less fill in valid item specifics or know what equipment it is compatible with? Unless there is a robust and through remote control database of some kind in the future, the odds of that working correctly are very slim.

They didn't even address the issue of correctly testing and cleaning remotes, which can take far more time than writing a basic description oneself.

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I sell remotes, too (I used to sell a lot more of them - lately not so much). I found it a really odd example for Jamie to use due exactly for the reasons you cite.

[valueaddedresource]

Great points @fm2000 ! I always thought it was an odd example to use for that reason too.

Most of my professional eBay experience has been in the Motors parts and accessories categories and you'd run into the same problem there - look at all the problems eBay *still* has with their fitment tool and tell me their AI would have any chance of getting that right. 😂

[mr_lincoln]

@valueaddedresource 

This application of AI might eventually be a good tool for NIB items but I suspect it will always fall short on used items and collectibles where Conditions can vary widely ...  

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@mr_lincoln wrote:

@valueaddedresource 

This application of AI might eventually be a good tool for NIB items but I suspect it will always fall short on used items and collectibles where Conditions can vary widely ...  

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@mr_lincoln  yeah, interestingly this tool in its current state at least doesn't even attempt to ascertain condition - and I agree with you that it likely will never be very good at doing that even if it tried.

Just to see how it would work, on the mousepad example I did select one of the variation listings and pretended that was a match. The next step from there was that it created a different title and filled in item specifics based on the item I had selected as a match.

From there it then moved to the description field, where it suggested I use the AI description generator that we've had for a while of course and then everything else, condition, shipping info, return policy etc would have to be filled in like usual.

So really the only "new" thing here is that the AI is supposed to help you identify what the item is and fill in the item specifics and....at least in my testing, it completely failed at that.