OpenAI Delivers What eBay Can't: What UK Sellers Are Saying About AI Activate Program
Sellers question eBay UK’s OpenAI AI Activate rollout, expressing disappointment at lack of integration and asking why new AI features aren’t built into the marketplace’s own tools.
The AI Activate program, introduced earlier this month at eBay Open UK, gives participating business sellers up to 12 months of ChatGPT enterprise access for free, plus personalized guidance to help them deploy AI in their operations.
Liz Morton
To kick the partnership off, eBay UK invited Tiana Abdulmassih from OpenAI to host two AI Foundations workshops at the event, guiding sellers on how to make AI their "super assistant."
But somewhat embarrassingly, these presentations and the questions that followed only seemed to highlight the failures or limitations of eBay's own AI tools for sellers.
For example, the first task Abdulmassih demonstrated was how to use ChatGPT to write an optimized product description.
The first example I want to share with you all is if you're using ChatGPT to help write product descriptions optimized for SEO...
..I know eBay already has a number of really solid built-in tools built on large language models. You should continue to use those and think of this as something to kind of expedite that.
So, we're going to begin here and ask ChatGPT to act as an experienced ecommerce copywriter. And then we're going to ask it to write three very engaging product descriptions for my handmade soy candles...and at the end I also give a little description about each candle, right? I'm giving it some keywords that I want to focus on. I'm trying to give chat more context on my business and what I'm working on.
Now, there's many different ways you could do this. You could take screenshots of your website and just throw it on in here, upload as an image. You can continue to write more text and describe it...
...And as you see here, it works pretty quickly to give you three product descriptions tailored for these candles.
I could copy each one individually. I could come here and edit them. And it's always going to prompt me at the end to say, "Hey, do you want me to adjust the tone to make this more playful?" Maybe, for instance, I actually just want one sentence.
So I could just come in here quickly and say, "Hey, make this edit for me. I actually want them to be shorter." So now I have a really long version of each and I have a short version of each. So depending on where you're trying to use this copy, you can flex it quite easily using chat GPT.
eBay introduced their own AI description generator directly within the listing flow in 2023 but both the app and desktop web versions experienced embarrassing premature launch failures which resulted in them being pulled from production after just a few days due to a "bug in the client logic" which created a "broken user experience and confusion when found by sellers."
Liz Morton
The eBay AI description generator was reintroduced and is functional now, but over 2 years after the official launch, it's still just a bare minimum, basic tool which provides no ability for sellers to use prompts to effect the output.
In fact, the number one request I've seen from sellers for additional functionality is the ability to finetune the "tone", saying they often find eBay's out of the box results to be too verbose and flowery - but since that capability still doesn't exist, sellers have to use external tools like ChatGPT.
Abdulmassih also showed how you can simply drop a product image in ChatGPT and ask it to create an optimized description just from the picture alone - which is what CEO Jamie Iannone promised eBay Magical Listing would be able to do when he originally pitched it to investors in 2023.
~2 years later Magical Listing has failed to live up to the hype as it still requires sellers to do far too much manual text entry to give the AI context - and even then, the results are disappointing as the tool is often unable to recognize and fill in important details automatically.
Liz Morton
Abdulmassih also showed how sellers can use ChatGPT to help them provide better customer service by writing professional responses to buyer messages.
I know a lot of you deal with of course customer inquiries, right? People who are buying your products off of eBay, off your websites, off Instagram and Tik Tok and sometimes there are issues.
Sometimes they got the wrong item, sometimes there might be shipping delays and people are simply asking questions. And we want to make sure that you all have the tools to respond to them in a thoughtful way and that reflects the tone of your company, but hopefully be able to do that at scale to save you some time.
So I'm going to draft a friendly response here or ask ChatGPT to a customer asking about a shipping delay. Now to do that I'm going to create a new chat here...and I'm saying act as a customer service rep for a small independent bike shop.
A customer has reached out asking why their order of a saddle is delayed. And I'm going to ask ChatGPT to write a warm, empathetic, and professional email explaining the situation to them. And at the very end offering, you know, a 10% discount on their next order.
Now, you could take a screenshot of their email, also...say you have 10 emails that you're waiting to respond to. You could upload those all at once and basically say, "Hey, I need responses to all of these."
Again, eBay recently introduced AI responses built directly into eBay Messaging experience - and again, it is very limited and basic functionality with no ability for the seller to prompt for tone or anything else, leaving sellers needing to use ChatGPT or other external tools if they want that additional functionality.
Liz Morton
The second session delved into how sellers can use ChatGPT for business analytics and market trend research to help make smarter sourcing and pricing decisions.
Abdulmassih and eBay AI Product Manager, Christian Bornmann, took seller questions at the end of each session - most of which seemed disappointed with the lack of more direct integration between ChatGPT and eBay as part of the AI Activate program.
For example, one seller asked whether the AI could help reduce the tedious work of filling in item specifics.
Seller: A lot of the focus of the AI has been around on descriptions and content. Can it be used to enhance actual item specifics? So on eBay listings, you may have a lot of what you ask for is actually within content..can any of the AI functionality be used to lift it out of there and populate those fields?
Bornmann: You mean like automatically like integrated directly?
Seller: Correct.
Bornmann: Not yet. So it can greatly help you distill or extract them but you would still have to export and then later on import them back into your eBay account for now.
Another seller expressed similar disappointment in the "copy and paste" nature of what was being shown in the demo, saying they had hoped for a tighter integration especially for writing descriptions.
Seller: I've been using chat GPT on and off for maybe two years, but I was hoping that you're going to show something a little bit more with a tighter integration. This seems to be very much a copy paste integration.
I've tried and have been quite disappointed with using AI to tighten up the the product description...so really this is what you're showing here is a copy paste level integration. Is that correct?
Bornmann: Yeah. Well, just to be very clear, so with this launch now, there is no integration into your account. I'm not saying there never will be, but it's like we are working on road maps and we need to see.
And Abdulmassih made it clear that the integration limitations currently are mostly on the eBay side - there are ways OpenAI could connect more directly with the site, but that will be up to eBay to develop and deploy in the future.
Seller: In terms of the integration for ChatGPT into eBay, what level does it integrate to? For example, is this going to go further than just listings? Can it be involved with analytics and more information about customers..how much further does it go than just listings?
Abdulmassih: Yeah, so the the ChatGPT instance itself that you all have access to will not out of the box have data connectors into the eBay.com experience right now. I would view this as a separate application.
I think there's a world in which that capability is possible. So, that will be something for Christian and the eBay team to set up potentially further down the line, but as of right now, I would think of this as like an assistant outside of eBay.com that of course you can use for eBay and use for the rest of your business.
If you're a UK eBay seller taking part in the AI Activate program - do you find it a useful addition to your business process or just more disappointing AI hype? Let us know in the in the comments below!
