eBay Motors launched a new mobile app to make buying and selling vehicles easier, touting an “optimized shopping and selling journey.” Car owners can snap a photo of their license plate, and eBay will auto-populate fields with details about the car for faster listing.
The eBay Motors app is available on both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. New “innovations” (features) include a personalized homepage, streamlined listing capabilities, and improved search filters.
eBay highlighted some of the features of the new app as follows:
- List with just your License Plate: When selling a vehicle, the user will be prompted by the app to take a photo of the license plate, which the app will use to automatically populate key details such as make and model, year and VIN. In just a few steps, and in less than 5 minutes, a seller can create and populate a listing, including uploading images and a video of the vehicle to entice the right buyer.
- AI Powered Image Sorting: When listing or viewing a vehicle on the new eBay Motors app, images of the vehicle will be automatically organized by AI to provide a listing which looks like it was created by a mechanic.
- Featured Searches: Check out featured searches, ranging from low riders to lifted trucks. Need some inspiration? Look for the cars from your favorite movies, or vintage cars that were popular in years past. Find something you like? Use the favorites feature to save it.
eBay explained how it built a categorization model and wrote, “the original algorithm was constructed by a single engineer in a couple of days, who trained the model using a few hundred photos from existing eBay car listings.”
eBay also declared that AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Machine Learning (ML) are now mature technologies that are readily available to developers: “The ease-of-development speaks to the maturity of AI and ML, which have moved beyond the province of data scientists to off-the-shelf tools which are available to software engineers.”
VentureBeat pointed out that eBay had killed its first Motors app 4 years ago. (We had written about its initial launch in 2011.) It also noted, “As an aside here, while eBay already allowed users to embed videos directly from sites such as YouTube, the new eBay Motors app will now support video uploads — a first for any eBay app.”
They have to come up with something quick, but I’m sure they were working on this quite a while. They said they wanted the focus to be on the core marketplace and eBay motors is a part of the core. Somehow not enough though.
Nothing is going to save this disaster of a quarter. For years I’ve managed to stay profitable around their insanity. Nothing seems to be able to save it now. I will stay profitable…..elsewhere. I’ve put myself on Vacation until the end of the year. Absolutely freeing it is.