Artem Zmitrovich
At a press conference held by eBay in Tel Aviv, 13th of February, Elad Goldenberg – Head of eBay Israel Business Unit and Dr. Kira Radinsky – Chief Scientist (IL) & Director of Data Science at eBay joined to discuss the past year and the near future at eBay.
Elad was the first to take the stage, with a very impressive presentation with statistics about eBay Israel which you can find here in Hebrew on this link, and some of the headlines were rather shocking, like the fact that every 2 seconds an Israeli buys something on eBay, and that in the past year, 633 vehicles were purchased on eBay and shipped to Israel, while over 60 thousand dental implants were shipped from it.
Consumers are buying with direct links out of recommendation in Facebook groups. This is a trend that is bound to grow and already brought to purchases of over a million products.
Another topic he covered was the fast-paced growing communities on Facebook, and that VR related items sales have increased by 2000%!! Also, 61% of total purchases worldwide are, at least at one point, going through the mobile phone.
Later, Dr. Kira Radinsky showcased several AI based technological developments that her and her company, SalesPredict (Which was acquired by eBay for about 20 Million Dollars) were working on for the past year.
Using Machine Learning, Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, users will get to see original items that no factory has ever made in their results pages, and upon purchasing that unique product, sellers will be the ones who make the bidding with the price and the delivery date to win the chance to manufacture and ship it to the customer.
If you are looking to prepare yourself for it, exploring for investments in 3D printers can be interesting.
Another powerful tool that is going to be implemented is a system that will build fully automated descriptions for listings that looks perfectly natural and are amazing in terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). At first, the tool will be tested on listings without any description and with selected sellers.
Keep an eye out for those great innovations, as they are going to change the way people are shopping online, so make sure you won’t miss all the action.
Update:
Following the latest eCommerce trends, we went to the Retail Disrupt Tech Conference and spent most of the time exploring the booths & companies that were presenting their innovations, and talking with interesting founders, developers, marketers, and practitioners in the retail and e-commerce industry, and witnessed some of the coolest projects first hand. The impact these changes will bring to this world of commerce will be incredible!
