Will AI transform shopping?

Shopping on the likes of eBay and Etsy can feel like “treasure hunting at a giant flea market”, with millions of listings to sort through, says Jinjoo Lee. The average search on Etsy yields more than 10,000 items. No wonder online marketplaces are “keen to add artificial-intelligence [AI] functionality to their search bars”. In April, eBay, with around two billion live listings, introduced an AI-powered feature called “shop the look”, which provides users with a selection of outfits based on their shopping history. ThredUp launched an AI product this year that can “intuit what the user is actually looking for”. However, a “fully conversational” online experience is some way off. Google finds that as “page-load time” rises from one to five seconds – and latency in generative AI is measured in seconds – the probability of a user giving up nearly doubles. Large language queries are about five times more expensive than traditional models, so users would need to spend more to justify the investment. In the near term, a better use of AI might be reducing hassle for sellers, for example by automatically filling out product information, as eBay is doing. Either way, for online marketplaces, “further breakthroughs” can’t come “fast enough”.