eBay ShopBot Now Ready for Holiday Gifting

The science behind finding the perfect gift

Less than a month ago, I introduced eBay ShopBot, and eBay’s vision for a true AI-powered personal shopping assistant.

In the weeks since, we’ve gotten great feedback from our community, and have already rolled out improvements across Natural Language Understanding, Computer Vision, Speed, Search, and Personalization. eBay ShopBot is getting better and smarter every week, thanks to all the shoppers chatting with it.

I’m excited to now introduce our latest update, Gifts, a new way to shop for great deals on amazing presents for your loved ones. In our research*, we’ve found that 81% of Americans agree that finding the perfect gift becomes more difficult each year. With eBay ShopBot Gifts, the bot will help you find thoughtful gifts quickly — everything for your mom or dad to the boss. With over a billion items to choose from and updated AI smarts, you’ll definitely find a unique, amazing gift that truly feels like it was made for them, always at a great price.

To do this right, we trained eBay ShopBot to understand relationships, so when you ask for a gift for your mom, it understands gender and age ranges, and can help you narrow your focus further to find that perfect gift. We curated collections for the coolest and greatest items on ebay, with an emphasis on the best deals and values.

We then trained our AI to know how to make the correlation between these collections and what you are searching for. You can also let it know what price ranges work for you. We are still in Beta, so eBay ShopBot might not get it right every single time, but even in its early stages — eBay ShopBot can help you find pretty amazing gifts.

This is what it comes down to: when you’re ready to find a gift, just tell ShopBot who you’re looking for. “I want a gift for my mom.”

Or, you can browse our catalog of gift guides, with over 50 different hand-picked collections, making sure you’ve got everyone covered.

You can always get to our gift guide through Shop collections in the Messenger menu:

And of course we are still very early in our beta, with still more shopping intelligence coming this year for ShopBot! Stay tuned for more updates and behind the scenes discussions at the intersection of commerce and AI.

If you haven’t already, say “Hi!” to eBay ShopBot this holiday season. :)

*Methodological Notes:

The eBay Survey was conducted by Wakefield Research (www.wakefieldresearch.com) among 1,000 nationally representative U.S. adults ages 18+, between October 7th and October 13th, 2016, using an email invitation and an online survey. Quotas have been set to ensure reliable and accurate representation of the U.S. adult population ages 18+. Results of any sample are subject to sampling variation. The magnitude of the variation is measurable and is affected by the number of interviews and the level of the percentages expressing the results. For the interviews conducted in this particular study, the chances are 95 in 100 that a survey result does not vary, plus or minus, by more than 3.1 percentage points from the result that would be obtained if interviews had been conducted with all persons in the universe represented by the sample.