eBay Sets Up Visual Search For Online Shopping

Shopping on eBay just got easier. The auction site has announced the launch of two new visual search tools that will allow people to use photos they snap, have saved on their phone or find on the web and social media sites, in order to find matching products from among eBay’s 1.1 billion listings.

The new image-recognition features – Find It On eBay and Image Search – are live on eBay’s mobile apps.

With Find It On eBay, if you find an item on any social platform, such as Facebook, or while browsing your favorite blog or website, you can simply “share” the image with eBay and the eBay mobile app will find similar listings.

And with eBay’s Image Search, you can simply click on the camera button and take a photo or use an existing photo from your camera roll. eBay will then display listings for items that are a close match or similar to what you want to buy.

The new features utilize the latest advances in two core parts of artificial intelligence: computer vision and deep learning. When you upload images to run Find It On eBay and Image Search, the site uses a deep learning model called a convolutional neural network to process the images.

“The output of the model gives us a representation of your image that we can use to compare to the images of the live listings on eBay. Then, we rank the items based on visual similarity and use our open-source Kubernetes platform to quickly bring these results to you, wherever you are in the world,” the company explained in the announcement.

As shoppers continue to search with pictures, Find It On eBay and Image Search will get smarter, learn and improve on the results that surface.

Find It On eBay is now live on Android, while Image Search is live on Android and iOS.