Dive Brief:
- EBay put its personalized shopping assistant “ShopBot” into beta on Facebook Messenger Monday, according to a company blog post.
- The AI assistant is powered by contextual understanding, predictive modeling and machine learning for EBay’s massive inventory.
- Users can text, talk or send an image to let ShopBot know what they are looking for; the assistant will then ask questions to understand intent and make personalized shopping recommendations.
Dive Insight:
EBay clearly sees conversational e-commerce's potential for immediately facilitating purchases and customer care, and also understands the growing importance of expanding brand reach beyond its own site and into other markets like Messenger. Given its open API, Messenger has become a particularly popular platform for assistants like ShopBot, with over 11,000 live bots to date.
ShopBot is a smart fit for an established e-commerce market like eBay as well, but it's still in its infancy, and the company noted that the user experience will continually improve as more people take advantage of the service.
“EBay ShopBot still has a lot to learn. While many shopping journeys with ShopBot will be delightful, many of them will also stump the bot,” RJ Pittman, chief product officer at eBay, explained in the post. “The more that people use it, the smarter eBay ShopBot will get."
EBay was an early brand adopter of Facebook Messenger earlier this year when it began testing a way to automatically alert customers when an auction is ending for an item they have bid on.
While Facebook Messenger is quickly building a presence in conversational commerce, other messaging apps are quickly catching up, with Kik launching a fashion and beauty bot category just a few weeks ago.