New York — 

When Jamie Iannone took over as eBay’s chief executive in early 2020, the company had undergone a leadership shakeup and was in the process of shedding businesses under pressure from activist investors. One of the internet’s original shopping sites, it had just lost its position as the second largest ecommerce platform to Walmart amid a decline in relevance.

But it soon got a boost from the Covid-19 pandemic. And now, the company wants to build on that momentum by investing in artificial intelligence. This year alone, eBay has introduced five new AI features, including AI-backed shipping estimates and a shopping chatbot, as well as a partnership with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.

Investors appear optimistic about the strategy. eBay’s stock has surged 75% since 2020; this year, its shares are up more than those of tech heavyweights Microsoft, Meta and Amazon.

Still, reinventing a 30-year-old online marketplace is no small task, especially considering the competition it faces from sites ranging from Amazon and Shein to Etsy and Poshmark. eBay remains among the top US retail e-commerce sites, but its market share has shrunk — from more than 7% in 2016 to less than 3% this year — as the field has widened, data provided by Emarketer shows.

What’s more, nearly every online retailer is currently looking to attract customers with new AI tools.

Iannone said eBay’s age is an advantage in the AI era: It has decades of product listings and customer interactions with which to train AI models to improve the platform, not to mention its 2.4 billion active listings.

“We have really unique data, if you think about all the categories that we transact in, we have 134 million buyers on the platform,” Iannone said in an interview with CNN.

The pandemic created many “accidental entrepreneurs” who realized they had a bunch of old stuff they could sell on eBay while spending more time at home. Now, eBay is using AI to make it easier for amateur sellers to list items on the platform.

eBay’s “magical listing” tool automatically fills out product descriptions and details when sellers take a photo of an item they want to list. AI image technology can also spruce up a listing — making it look like the doll you photographed on your dusty garage shelf is actually sitting on a nice, clean table.

eBay also unveiled an AI assistant for US and UK sellers in August that can respond to common questions from buyers, such as where an item can be shipped to, based on information in the product’s description.

eBay estimates the average American has $3,000 to $4,000 worth of unused products that could be sold on the site.

“This is a big challenge for the resale industry overall,” said Emarketer analyst Sky Canaves. “Ordinary US consumers have a lot of items in their homes that they aren’t using and that are going to waste. They might end up being donated or thrown in the trash.”

If eBay can get people to sell those goods instead, it could boost the company’s gross merchandise volume (GMV), a key performance metric that captures the total value of transactions on the site. eBay reported GMV grew 10% year-on-year in the most recent quarter.

“AI product investments look to be gaining real traction” with buyers and sellers on eBay, Barclays analysts wrote in an October note.

eBay’s revenue grew 9% year-on-year to $2.8 billion in the September quarter, a higher growth rate than Walmart and Esty posted in the quarter and on par with Amazon’s North America sales growth. Still, while AI investments may be making some early revenue contributions, much of that growth likely owes to eBay’s focus on core categories such as car parts, sneakers and handbags.

The ability to find super specific items with ease on eBay has always been somewhat of a rarefied skill. Around 70% of transactions on the site come from enthusiasts who “know how to search and shop the platform like crazy,” according to Iannone.

Iannone is betting a new AI shopping agent will make it easier for new or less frequent customers to find exactly what they’re looking for. With the “eBay.ai” tool, customers can describe what they’re looking for in natural language and the bot will recommend products based on the conversation.

AI tools like these that make it easier for people to list or buy products could give eBay an advantage, especially since its reputation for offering collectible and budget items helps set it apart from big-box retailers, Canaves said.

“Their product mix is very distinct and unique and that creates challenges for them in terms of the range of sellers and the product mix that they have, and it also creates opportunities for AI tools to help improve their business,” she said.

The shopping tool is currently available only to a small percentage of customers and eBay has not yet disclosed when it will be widely accessible. In the meantime, it’s up against live offerings from competitors such as Google and OpenAI, and AI shopping upstarts like Daydream, that are enabling customers to shop via chatbot. Amazon’s shopping chatbot is on pace to contribute $10 billion additional annual sales, CEO Andy Jassy said in the company’s most recent earnings call.

But those third-party agents could eventually boost eBay’s sales, too. Iannone suggested that the company might, for example, join OpenAI’s program for instant checkout in ChatGPT, saying he wants to make its listings easily searchable “both on eBay and off of eBay.”

While the company is focusing on AI, it still wants people coming to the site for human connection, too. eBay in September acquired Norway-based Tise, a social marketplace for secondhand goods, where users can follow and interact with sellers like they would influencers on Instagram.

“The human-to-human interaction is very important,” Iannone said. “We don’t want AI to take away the fact that you’re able to go find that great, unique product from this awesome seller on the platform and you build a connection because of that.”