“Magical” AI Store Banners? eBay Sellers Say Not Quite
Sellers say eBay's latest "magical" AI tool is another letdown as Store banner image generator provides irrelevant images with no way to edit or refine results.
The new tool can be found in the Store>Edit Store page in Seller Hub and is accessible using the pencil icon in the upper right of the Store banner.
Once you select "generate with eBay.ai", you'll be presented with a list of categories/themes to choose from - there is no option to enter your own category or prompt to refine the results.
Here are the current categories available:
- Collectibles
- Toys & Hobbies
- Dolls & Bears
- Stamps
- Jewelry & Watches
- Consumer Electronics
- Video Games & Consoles
- Tickets & Experiences
- Travel
- Coins & Paper Money
- Movies & TV
- Clothing, Shoes & Accessories
- Home & Garden
- Crafts
- Antiques
- Health & Beauty
- Entertainment Memorabilia
- Computers/Tablets & Networking
- Sports Mem, Cards & Fan Shop
- Gift Cards & Coupons
Unfortunately, the seller who took these screenshots is in Motors Parts & Accessories, which doesn't appear to be represented at all - a major oversight since P&A is one of eBay's largest categories.
However, even if they did have a category for Motors, the value of this tool would still be questionable considering that testing other categories revealed an embarrassing lack of relevance and creativity.
For Collectibles, it gave several iterations of the "coins in a box" theme before moving on to show what appears to be its interpretation of "grandma's attic."
But the results got even worse from there. When selecting Sports Memorabilia, Cards & Fan Shop the AI apparently couldn't come up with anything related to any of that, instead just regurgitating variations on random, generic colors and shapes.
The AI similarly got stuck in a loop of irrelevance with Jewelry & Watches somehow only evoking images of snowflakes despite multiple attempts to regenerate.
And if the incredibly irrelevant pictures weren't bad enough, not only is there no way to prompt the image generation, there is also no way to add text or do anything else to customize the banner.
In theory, once you save the image as your banner you could then use other options eBay provides to export it to VistaCreate and add text or do additional editing there - but if you're going to go through all that trouble, why not just create the banner in VistaCreate or your image editing tool of choice to begin with?
Ultimately this feature reminds me of the AI tools eBay has built into their Social Sharing feature as well - it's supposed to be solution to a something that most sellers don't really even think is a problem and even then, it fails to actually solve the supposed problem.
Meanwhile the AI tools sellers actually want to use, like "Magical Listing" either don't live up to the hype, still requiring a bunch of manual entry to "help" the AI along, or they keep breaking.
Liz Morton
And then there's all the ways eBay is using AI to alter seller-provided information in ways that sellers never asked for and may not even be aware is happening - like AI product highlights, AI description summaries and AI image clean up and watermark removal for external search.
Liz Morton
Considering that CEO Jamie Iannone just spent the last week making the media and investor conference rounds hyping up the company's 30 years of technical innovation and how they are using AI to "drive magical experiences" for buyers and sellers, eBay should be absolutely embarrassed and ashamed to launch something as not ready for primetime as this Store Banner generator.
