Newsletter
As an immensely popular online marketplace for every conceivable product that mankind has created, eBay shoulders a huge challenge of maintaining its lead over others in the field by not only bringing in new products to its inventory, but also to enrich them visually and let users get accurate pictures of what they’re buying and also the right price for the products. Every product listing on eBay is accompanied by detailed images and these play a big part in the final decision-making of consumers. To make it easier for consumers to see more of the products that they want to buy and to search for alternatives, eBay yesterday announced the acquisition of Corrigon Inc., a firm specializing in image recognition and visual search technologies which will go a long way in boosting eBay’s quality of search results for various products.
Amit Menipaz, the VP and GM of Structured Data at eBay says that the Corrigon Inc acquisition will let eBay power “deeper inventory insights for our sellers and compelling new user experiences for our buyers.” The technologies that Corrigon Inc possesses will enhance eBay’s ability to boost ‘image recognition, classification and image enhancements,’ by matching the best images to products thereby making it easier for consumers to view a large number of options in every product category and make informed decisions accordingly. “Working in partnership with eBay’s structured data team, we will help eBay sellers list more efficiently and eBay buyers find what they are looking for faster in order to increase customer sales conversion,” said Avinoam Omer, co-founder and CEO of Corrigon. It will be interesting to see if the Corrigan Inc acquisition will indeed boost eBay’s sales in the long term, but given that consumers do depend on images for making buying decisions, it will surely have an impact.
Along with improving the way it curates and markets products, eBay is also quite serious about how consumer-friendly its mobile applications are and if consumers are truly fond of them. An update to the eBay Android app in May introduced a colorful hamburger menu and material design-inspired search bar and user interface, thus making it easier for users to navigate through the app and find what they’re looking for in quick time. eBay has already acquired the likes of SalesPredict and Expertmaker earlier this year to boost its structured data efforts, and if it finally manages to perfect its triangle of collecting data, processing and enriching the data and finally creating product experiences, it would be able to compete effectively with Amazon in the online retail genre for years to come.