eBay Confirms It's Rolling Out AI Tool for Sellers

An eBay moderator confirmed on Thursday it's in the process of rolling out a feature that uses generative AI (artificial intelligence) after some sellers reported seeing it in the wild last week with no announcement.

An eBay seller told EcommerceBytes on May 24th that she clicked on an unlabeled icon when listing an item in the eBay app and it rewrote their entire description – with no undo button.

The seller characterized the new description as "some weird, seemingly AI-generated text," but was unable to retrieve their original description.

Sellers also buzzed about the feature last week in a thread on the eBay discussion boards. Today (June 1), an eBay moderator responded in the thread with the following post:

"Thank you for raising this issue. And I apologize for the experience you had. We are constantly testing new features to simplify your selling experience, and last week we inadvertently reverted to an older version of the listing flow — it didn't have the "undo button" and some other important features that significantly improve the Generative AI item description experience. The issue was resolved on the 25th, and the improved experience is being rolled out to sellers over the coming months."

Note that the moderator edited their post 37 minutes after posting the original response, changing it to read:

"Thank you for raising this issue. And I apologize for the experience you had. We are constantly testing new features to simplify your selling experience, and we regret that there was an issue on this experience for some Android users. The issue was resolved on the 25th, and the improved experience is being rolled out to sellers over the coming months."

The closest eBay had come to informing sellers of AI testing was a passing reference in a May 3rd post devoted to eBay first-quarter earnings, when the head of eBay US Adam Ireland said, "Many of us have heard of Generative AI, like Chat GPT, which is certainly a hot topic in the news. We’re currently in the process of creating a plug-in that will allow you to auto-generate item descriptions based on content already available across the web. And soon we’ll roll out tests for sellers to pre-populate categories and item specifics from a single photo—so you spend less time creating listings and more on growing and managing your business."