The metalworking and industrial supplies distributor said sales increased 8.6% year over year to $4.009 billion. And that happened even though MSC Industrial ecommerce sales, which account for more than 60% of total sales, slid by 3% year over year in the fiscal fourth quarter. Gershwind attributed the drop in digital sales mainly to public sector sales occurring in non-ecommerce channels.

Kirsten Actis-Grande, executive vice president and chief financial officer, MSC Industrial Supply Co.

MSC Industrial ecommerce sales

Full-year MSC Industrial ecommerce sales, however, rose 9.1% to $2.45 billion. Gershwind and Kirsten Actis-Grande, executive vice president and chief financial officer, said they expect to see improved ecommerce sales, especially as MSC rolls out upgrades to the company’s flagship ecommerce site, MSCDirect.com.

“Looking forward, we expect improvement in our ecommerce sales, particularly through MSCDirect.com, as we start rolling out enhanced capabilities, including improved search and navigation functions,” Actis-Grande said on a Q4 earnings call with investment analysts today.

Gershwind added that the “heavy-lifting” on ecommerce improvements have already been completed and that the ecommerce upgrades will occur “over the next quarter or so. … That’s when customers will begin seeing an impact.”

Still, he cautioned that the impact of better ecommerce technology will not be like turning on a light switch.

“This will build over time,” said, adding: “It is one of the things, though, that gives us confidence beyond this year.”

MSC Industrial defines ecommerce sales as those through digital channels including its ecommerce platforms, internet-connected vending machines, EDI, XML-based ordering systems and other electronic portals. MSC’s formal corporate name is MSC Industrial Direct Co. Inc., but it generally goes by the name of its main business unit, MSC Industrial Supply Co.

MSC Industrial earnings

For the fourth quarter ended Sept. 2, MSC Industrial reported:

• Total net sales rose 1.3% year over year to of $1.035 billion.
• MSC Industrial ecommerce sales fell about 3% to $627.1 million, accounting for 60.5% of total sales.
• Gross profit margin of 40.5%, down from 41.9%.
• Net income fell 15.9% to $87.623 million.

For the fiscal year, MSC Industrial reported:

• Gross profit margin of 41.0%, down from 42.2%
• Net income inched up 1% to $343.23 million.

Paul Demery is a Digital Commerce 360 contributing editor covering B2B digital commerce technology and strategy. paul@digitalcommerce360.com.

Percentage changes may not align exactly with dollar figures due to rounding. Check back for more earnings reports. Here’s last quarter’s MSC Industrial report.

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Earlier this month, Drinks sold Wine Insiders for an undisclosed sum to Full Glass Wine Co., which also owns the Winc retail wine ecommerce site. The sale opens the door for Drinks, or Drinks.com, to focus on selling its digital commerce technology stack, designed to enable any online merchant to add alcoholic beverages to product catalogs and such venues as “influencer” web storefronts.

Zac Brandenberg, CEO, Drinks Holdings Inc.

While ecommerce is a fast-growing channel for consumers to discover and purchase beverages, sales of alcoholic beverages through the digital channel are growing even faster, says Drinks chief executive and co-founder Zac Brandenberg.

“Consumers want to engage with brands/merchants at their convenience — where they want to, when they want to. That means from their laptop, their phone, their couch, etc.,” Brandenberg says. “As the alcohol category starts to come online, you’re going to see consumers rapidly adopt a digital shopping modality.”

To capitalize on consumers’ growing preference to purchase alcoholic beverages online, Drinks’s strategy is to focus on bridging the gap between consumers’ growing desire to purchase alcohol online and alcohol companies’ ability to scale online sales. The sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States totals about $250 billion, the company says.

“The growth in the sale of alcoholic beverages online increases the total addressable market opportunity because it expands consumer choice and access, particularly in markets where regulatory restrictions have limited shopping access points or SKUs available to consumers or created other impediments,” says Brandenberg,  adding: “The growth in the sale of alcoholic beverages online is not being fueled exclusively by the shift away from brick-and-mortar shopping.”

At the core of Drinks’s business is its Drinks app for Shopify, which provides Shopify merchants of all sizes with an embedded, real-time alcohol tax and regulatory solution. In addition, the platform helps merchants that want to sell alcoholic beverages manage regulatory compliance, required disclosures, customer messaging, product catalog and inventory management, merchandising optimization, and product fulfillment.

An app for managing online alcoholic beverage sales

“Our vision is to provide an operating system for this industry — that means any business that wants to sell alcohol online,” Brandenberg says. “Our Drinks Shopify App provides the regulatory technology for alcohol producers and merchants to sell alcohol online.”

In addition to its core regulatory tax compliance platform, Drinks offers a wine-as-a-service (WaaS) platform to develop a branded nationwide wine program and offer omnichannel shopping experiences. As a result, ecommerce merchants that don’t carry a liquor license can add alcoholic beverages as a product category in a fully compliant manner directly to their storefront, Drinks says.

Retailers such as Macy’s Wine Shop, Thrive Market and Misfits Market use the Drinks platform.

Other apps offered by Drinks include its Pair platform, which uses data-driven insights with artificial intelligence and machine learning to create personalized shopping experiences. The company also operates a customer experience and retention agency called Electriq, which helps wineries take the tasting room experience online and increase customer loyalty through lifecycle strategies, email/SMS marketing, and web design and development.

“We have a lengthy waitlist of merchants who want to add beverage alcohol products into their storefronts, covering almost any audience,” Brandenberg says. “Drinks is enabling any business that sells something online to now be in the alcohol business. We are able to power online, direct-to-consumer alcohol commerce for bellwether retailers, digital-first commerce brands, and celebrities like Martha Stewart and Geoffrey Zakarian. As we scale our technology footprint, more merchant types, as well as experts, creators and influencers will follow suit.”

One merchant segment that looks especially promising is “creator” and influencer websites, which are not part of the alcohol ecosystem in the traditional sense. Tapping this merchant segment represents new distribution opportunities for alcoholic beverage brands.

“The early innings of creator/influencer-driven marketing have operated similar to an old-school affiliate model, where an endorsement led to a transaction on a brand/merchant site,” Brandenberg says. “That’s obviously evolving, and opportunities abound for the creators themselves to be the conduit for transactions, to maintain that one-to-one relationship they have with their audience. That presents an opportunity for us to enable an ever-increasing number of consumer-facing commerce sites or outlets.”

Peter Lucas is a Digital Commerce 360 contributing editor covering B2B digital commerce technology and strategy.

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The move is timely. It puts the global software company into a broad market push to help businesses facing supply chain challenges capitalize on AI advantages in procurement and supply chain activities. SAP provides widely used business operations software.

“GenAI is being embraced and adopted at a rapid scale, including in procurement,” says Jeffrey Rajamani, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. He covers procurement and sourcing technology and strategy. “It’s good to see that SAP has joined the bandwagon in bringing GenAI innovations in spend management. Sourcing and procurement functions in organizations are being disrupted, as the C-suite is tasking them with more strategic imperatives.”

SAP announced at its Connect Live event in Vienna, Austria, this week that it will soon make available procurement software applications embedded with GenAI to help procurement professionals.

The new SAP GenAI applications will help to:

• More quickly build comprehensive product categories through SAP Ariba Category Management.
• Improve spend management to identify cost-saving opportunities and more efficient purchasing practices through the SAP Spend Control Tower application.
• Expedite how they assess the risk of dealing with new suppliers through SAP Ariba Sourcing, SAP Ariba Contracts and SAP Ariba Buying software as AI helps to uncover suppliers’ reputations related to product quality and delivery service.
• More quickly identify new suppliers that meet their purchasing requirements related to product specifications and other criteria through SAP Ariba Sourcing. SAP recently integrated Ariba Sourcing with Scoutbee Discovery, an AI-powered supplier search application.

Christian Klein, CEO, SAP SE

Last month, SAP announced its release of Joule, a natural-language, generative AI tool it describes as a GenAI copilot. SAP will embed it into its applications for:

• Supply chains
• Procurement
• Customer experience
• Human resources
• Finance

SAP says Joule is designed for “quickly sorting through and contextualizing data from multiple systems to surface smarter insights.”

Joule has almost 300 million enterprise users around the world working regularly with cloud solutions from SAP, says SAP CEO Christian Klein.

And it “has the power to redefine the way businesses — and the people who power them — work,” Klein says.

SAP has room to grow with AI applications

When it launched Joule, SAP noted how a company might use it to check the cause of a sales decline.

“Imagine, for example, a manufacturer asking Joule for help understanding sales performance better. Joule can identify underperforming regions, link to other data sets to reveal a supply chain issue, and automatically connect to the supply chain system to offer potential fixes for the manufacturer’s review.”

Rajamani says SAP is off to a good start with AI-powered send management, which Forrester refers to as “supplier value management” or SVM. But he suggests it has room to grow with AI.

“While SAP seems to have addressed the supplier discovery, spend analytics, risk management and expense management parts of SVM, there are other areas where I think the demand for AI/GenAI has exploded exponentially: contract life cycle management and procure-to-pay,” he says. “It would be good for SAP to think through these important components, too, such as a GenAI bot to negotiate contracts.” (Procure-to-pay software manages and records commerce activity from the point a buyer begins the procurement process through payment.)

SAP conducted its Connect Live event Oct. 9 to 11. It did not immediately return a request for additional comments about its AI plans.

Paul Demery is a Digital Commerce 360 contributing editor covering B2B digital commerce technology and strategy. paul@digitalcommerce360.com.

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RoadEx then delivers them to retailers looking to quickly get trendy furniture and merchandise into showrooms and store shelves or to consumers’ doorsteps. RoadEx is a trucking and logistics services company.

Lisa Wan, executive vice president, RoadEx America

“A lot of ecommerce customers are looking for containers delivered more quickly to their warehouses for a faster turnaround. They need to empty them and have cargoes they ship to their stores or direct to consumers,” says Lisa Wan, executive vice president of operations, RoadEx America.

RoadEx has been expediting its container pick-up and delivery service with new web-based software. The software lets it know when its clients’ incoming containers will be available for pick-up at a port terminal. It also uses complementary drayage-management software to route its container-carrying trucks. The software does so in a way that puts them at that terminal at the scheduled pick-up time, Wan says.

The web-based drayOS drayage management system, from PortPro, also lets RoadEx optimize the routing of its container trucks. In addition, drayOS offers an online portal for customers to check the expected delivery time of their containers and access shipping invoices.

Providing the Uber experience in shipping

“Nowadays, our customers are expecting more visibility to the point of comparing it to Uber,” where they can see who their driver is, what vehicle they’re in, and when they’ll arrive, Wan says.

That expectation is likely to only increase as ecommerce accounts for more container shipping, she and others say.

Ecommerce orders of products ranging from electronics and food to cars and chemicals is driving up business at U.S. ports. It’s sparking demand for “port-to-door” transportation-management systems, according to a new report, 2023 State of Drayage.

The U.S. drayage market — transporting goods from container ships to distribution centers, retailers and end customers — is on course to grow. It’ll go from $6.1 billion last year to $8.3 billion by 2027, according to figures the report cites from market research firm Technavio. Globally, the drayage services market will grow from about $25.2 billion last year to more than $28.2 billion in 2027.

Michael Mecca, CEO, PortPro

Michael Mecca, CEO and founder of PortPro, says that as companies source products through global supply chains and ship them to customers, they face the challenge of getting shipment visibility and status and sharing it with their trading partners.

“This lack of visibility leads to costly headaches like containers and equipment being double-handled, and drivers stuck waiting in line at marine terminals,” the report says. “It also causes a whole host of operational inefficiencies that ripple across the enterprise for drayage carriers.”

A spokeswoman says that PortPro produced the report based on information derived from logistics services companies and research firms. PortPro provides transportation-management software for drayage trucking companies.

RoadEx uses PortPro technology to fill a void

Mecca says web-based digital drayage management systems, such as PortPro’s drayOS, help fill a void of shipment visibility between ports and final destinations.

Mecca notes that PortPro is on course to double its revenue this year after tripling last year. He founded it in 2019. PortPro raised $12 million in funding late last year from Avenue Growth Partners. And it’s using the funds to continue developing its software for managing drayage operations.

At RoadEx, Wan says she expects to rely on drayage-management systems even more in the years ahead. She notes that the systems will be crucial to deal with market disruptions. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic caused severe back-ups at port facilities. And with systems that help container carriers expedite deliveries and provide arrival times, retailers and other shippers may forego air freight for less costly if far slower ocean container routes, she adds.

PortPro primarily works with trucking companies in the United States and Canada. But recently, it expanded into Europe, offering its software to drayage firms serving Rotterdam, Netherlands.

“Rotterdam to New Jersey is a really common shipping lane now,” Mecca says. He adds, “We’re working on moving into more continents, more countries.”

Paul Demery is a Digital Commerce 360 contributing editor covering B2B digital commerce technology and strategy. paul@digitalcommerce360.com.

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The manufacturer and distributor specializes in automated control products for commercial and industrial buildings. For Kele, a high personalization performance level is critical to winning over loyal customers in a competitive market.

“Failing to swiftly provide a relevant, personalized experience — whether through self-service ecommerce or telephone interactions — could result in missed opportunities to acquire new customer accounts or expand existing relationships,” says John Strawn, Kele’s chief marketing officer.

He says a critical driver behind that experience is a suite of advanced technologies capable of instantly recognizing customers and then presenting them with relevant products aligned with their preferences. Kele boasts a comprehensive range of over 100,000 SKUs. It caters to building automation systems governing operations such as HVAC, lighting, flow, and security in commercial and industrial settings.

“Compiling product and customer intent data across all sources and decisioning in real time would have been impossible five years ago,” Strawn says. “AI serves as a pivotal tool in streamlining the connection between customers and these products, ensuring a swift and seamless experience to better understand your customers’ needs and serve them across channels.”

Stephen Rudolph, Kele’s chief technology officer, acknowledges the nascent stage of AI’s development. Nonetheless, he highlights its remarkable potential to impact sectors like marketing and software development, significantly amplifying the efficiency and productivity of respective teams.

Lenovo nearly doubles revenue via search results

At Lenovo, the computer manufacturer and marketer realized it needed to upgrade its ecommerce site’s search experience. The move led to a 95% increase in revenue gained through search results.

“We index half a million records every 12 hours,” says Marc Desormeau, head of global search. “Everything from data feed and product information, pricing, catalogs, things we sell.”

“We’re using data captured from our search engagements to inform some of our investments in SEM by looking at customers who are coming to us organically,” he adds. “How are they then engaging with our own site search? How can we start joining some of that data to ultimately present a better experience?”

So Lenovo upgraded its site search experience. It replaced legacy technology with site search technology design with AI-powered capabilities.

In the new report, “B2B Ecommerce Trends,” Kele, Lenovo and other companies and industry experts expound on B2B trends leading to “unified commerce” experiences critical to engaging today’s B2B buyers and standing out in an increasingly competitive omnichannel market.

The Pacing B2B Ecommerce Trends report is available for a free download.

Paul Demery is a Digital Commerce 360 contributing editor covering B2B digital commerce technology and strategy. paul@digitalcommerce360.com.

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There are currently over 26.5 million ecommerce sites operating worldwide. Between 2019 and 2023, the number of ecommerce sites worldwide grew from 9.2 million to 26.5 million, says research from Markinblog.com, a digital marketing and sales services provider.

With nearly 14 million ecommerce sites, the U.S. now accounts for about 53% of all websites, far more than any other country. In comparison, the number two and three countries, the United Kingdom and Brazil, have 1.24 million and 730,000 ecommerce sites, respectively.

“The significant rise in ecommerce can largely be attributed to the COVID 19 pandemic, which led to a 204% year-on-year growth in ecommerce sites in 2021 alone, taking the number from 9.7 million to an impressive 19.8 million,” says Markinblog.com. “The United States is the leading country in ecommerce, with 13,982,500 sites, significantly outpacing the other countries. This indicates the highly digitalized nature of its economy and the significant role of online shopping in consumer behavior.”

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The online marketplace announced two new features, Buy with Prime Assist, and Buy with Prime Cart.

Buy with Prime Assist allows sellers to offer Amazon customer support for no additional charge. The service gives customers access to a chat feature with Amazon customer service representatives who can answer questions about shipping, current orders and returns. 

Buy with Prime Cart is another feature designed to make off-site purchasing experiences more like the experience on Amazon.com. Previously, Buy with Prime functioned similarly to Amazon’s Buy Now feature, Peter Larsen, Amazon vice president of Buy with Prime and multi-channel fulfillment, said in a blog post. Now, customers can buy multiple items at once, like a traditional online cart, he said.

What is Buy with Prime?

Amazon first launched the tool in April 2022. It allowed retailers to sell products also listed on Amazon from their own websites. Customers checked out using Amazon’s payment system and received orders using the ecommerce giant’s fulfillment network.

Retailers pay Amazon a fee to use the service, which Amazon has not disclosed.

There were about 167 million Prime Members who were eligible to check out using Buy with Prime as of March 2023, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, a Chicago firm that tracks Prime members via consumer surveys.

Why is Amazon expanding Buy with Prime now?

Amazon relies heavily on third-party sellers on its marketplace, which ranks No. 3 in the Global Online Marketplaces Database, Digital Commerce 360’s ranking of the top 100 online marketplaces. A majority (63.7%) of GMV in 2022 came from third-party sellers, a figure that’s increasing year over year. 

“As Amazon loses some of its position as the search engine for shopping, it is using other tactics to gain intelligence and maintain market share,” Digital Commerce 360 senior analyst James Risley says.

“Shopify is definitely a threat in terms of providing an alternative for sellers,” Risley says. “More than half of sales on Amazon are from third-party sellers, and if they turn to Shopify instead of Amazon or favor their own Shopify site, Amazon loses out.”

Notably, Amazon recently allowed Shopify merchants to offer Buy with Prime on their Shopify websites.

“Amazon partnering with Shopify is really a test for both of them. Shopify can use the Amazon payment options as a way to make it easier for merchants to get out of the strict Amazon.com ecosystem while not abandoning all of its benefits. Amazon gets to pull a potential competitor a little closer and keep it from threatening its position too much,” Risley says.

Amazon promises seller benefits

The online marketplace shared new data indicating that sellers who use Buy with Prime are better positioned than those that don’t.

Three out of four Buy with Prime purchasers, on average, are new customers to the brand, Amazon said. The tool also led to a 25% increase in conversion, on average, the online marketplace said. 

Other tools from Amazon also have positive impacts on sales. Retailers who added reviews from Amazon to their websites saw an average of 38% in conversion growth. Merchants using Buy with Prime cart reported 15% increase in units sold, on average, after adding the feature. 

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One option receiving more attention in recent years is headless commerce technology. Headless infrastructure separates the customer-facing front-end interface and back-end business operations software from the ecommerce engine, connecting them via APIs to support more customization without re-coding software.

But that customizing flexibility requires significant expertise in deploying and managing all those APIs and other aspects of headless infrastructure. Deciding whether to take the headless option depends on a company’s business model, market strategy and technical resources.

Learning more about headless commerce technology

In an infographic, we review the headless choices of three B2B companies and the objectives they addressed:

• Bradley Corp., a manufacturer of washroom and safety products for commercial and industrial markets.
• Normet Oy, a manufacturer of mining equipment.
• Keysight Technologies, a manufacturer of electronic testing equipment.

This infographic is the second in an ongoing series providing a brief review of the digital commerce technology B2B companies have deployed.

1. Bradley Corp.

Manufacturer of washroom and safety products for commercial and industrial markets. 

Headless commerce platform: Znode

Objectives realized:

Paul Demery is a Digital Commerce 360 contributing editor covering B2B digital commerce technology and strategy. paul@digitalcommerce360.com.

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The Microsoft Copilot Copyright Commitment will protect customers as long as they’ve “used the guardrails and content filters we have built into our products” Hossein Nowbar, General Counsel, Corporate Legal Affairs and Corporate Secretary at Microsoft, said in a Sept. 7 blog post. Microsoft also pledged to pay related fines or settlements and said it has taken steps to ensure its Copilots respect copyright.

“We believe in standing behind our customers when they use our products,” Nowbar said. “We are charging our commercial customers for our Copilots, and if their use creates legal issues, we should make this our problem rather than our customers’ problem.”

Microsoft ranks No. 88 in the Top 1000. The database is Digital Commerce 360’s ranking of the largest North American online retailers.

Microsoft connection to OpenAI and generative AI technology

Generative AI applications scoop up existing content such as art, articles and programming code. They then use it to generate new material that can simplify or automate a range of tasks. Microsoft is baking the technology, developed with partner OpenAI Inc., into many of its biggest products. That includes Office and Windows, potentially putting customers in legal jeopardy.

Artists, writers and software developers are already filing lawsuits or raising objections about their creations being used without their consent. In one complaint, lawyer and computer programmer Matthew Butterick accused Microsoft’s GitHub partner of allegedly violating open-source software development licenses. A group of anonymous individuals seeking class action status also has filed suit against OpenAI and Microsoft. They claiming the companies are stealing “vast amounts” of personal information to train AI models in a heedless hunt for profits.

News organizations are mulling their own complaints, comedian Sarah Silverman has filed suit against OpenAI and Meta Platforms Inc., and artists are suing AI image generators Stability AI and Midjourney in a San Francisco court, although the judge has expressed skepticism about aspects of the case.

Copyright infringement and generative AI

Generative AI could raise novel questions about the fair use of copyrighted materials, a legal defense that allows the use of content in certain cases. Fair-use doctrine itself has been further complicated by a May Supreme Court ruling in favor of a photographer who accused the Andy Warhol estate of improperly using her work to create 16 images of the late musician Prince.

It’s not the first time Microsoft has deployed a legal shield to keep customers loyal. In the 2000s, the company offered indemnification to partners and later customers using or reselling its software, a bid to differentiate Microsoft from Linux and other open-source software makers. In 2017, Microsoft, by then a seller of open-source software itself, offered to protect customers of its Azure cloud products from legal claims.

The company in June announced a program to help customers ensure the AI programs they run on Microsoft platforms meet global laws and regulations. Earlier this year, Adobe Inc. also offered subscribers of its AI tools legal protection against copyright infringement.

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Early in 2023, the marketplace built a tool based on Open AI’s ChatGPT that creates a product description based on data that sellers provide about a product’s category, condition, color, brand and more. It took about a month to develop the feature, Zhang says.

EBay calls this its magical listing tool, and it rolled it out for all of its marketplaces sellers listing items in its app in August.

EBay marketplace sellers give AI product description generator positive feedback

The marketplace has been “pleasantly surprised” by the overwhelmingly positive seller feedback, Zhang says. As of late July, sellers have given the tool a customer satisfaction score of 80%, which is among eBay’s highest CSAT scores for recent, new feature launches, according to the marketplace.

“We are so excited about what generative AI can ultimately unlock for our customers,” Zhang says.

EBay’s new generative AI tool writes product descriptions.

Zhang says roughly 30% of sellers shown the generative AI tool use it, and of those, 95% accept at least part of the description. Sellers can tweak the description, edit and delete as they like, Zhang says.

The AI bot tends to add adjectives and can be “a little flowery in the way it describes things,” Zhang says. It’s up to the seller to edit the wording and ensure it’s accurate.

EBay does not label AI descriptions as such

Because the marketplace seller edits and approves the listing, eBay does not label to shoppers which reviews the artificial intelligence wrote. Although, eBay does notify sellers when the tools they use are generative AI.

Kassi Socha, director analyst, retail, at research firm Gartner, cautions brands to be transparent to shoppers when they are using generative artificial intelligence. According to Gartner’s recent surveys, many consumers distrust generative AI, so retailers should be upfront and label content that uses the technology, Socha says.

In a July 2023 Gartner survey of 303 consumers, 34% of consumers rated their comfort level with generative AI in retail as “very or somewhat troubled,” 53% said they think it will strongly or somewhat negatively impact society, and 66% said they are concerned about discrimination or bias in generative AI.

Xiaodi Zhang, vice president of seller experience at eBay.

“I applaud retailers that are adopting the technology with confidence and testing the use of generative AI, but the continued guidance at Gartner would be to approach with caution and be prepared to adapt quickly if a weakness is exposed,” Socha says.

EBay piloted the tool internally before slowly rolling it out to a randomized group, representing 5% of sellers in May 2023.

“What’s amazing with generative AI is how quickly it works. We had a proof of concept in a matter of weeks,” Zhang says.

The tool’s goal is to address “the cold start problem” that eBay marketplace sellers face when trying to describe products, Zhang says.

“When you find something to sell at home, and you are going through the listing, and you are asked to describe the item, a lot of people face writer’s block of, ‘How do I describe this dress I bought last year that I never wore?’” Zhang says.

Further generative AI tools

To further help sellers list items faster, eBay is developing more generative AI tools. One tool allows a marketplace seller to upload an image in the iOS app, and the generative AI will write in the details, such as category, subcategory, product title and a description.

EBay marketplace sellers can upload a photo in the app and generative AI will write a description.

EBay also is piloting an AI tool that will remove the background of a seller’s image and replace it with a white image so the product stands out. While a number of eBay sellers have a professional setup to merchandise their product and have robust images, many do not, Zhang says. The tool’s goal is to remove clutter from a home seller’s photo, and help those sellers have a clean photo listing, Zhang says.

“Sellers tell us the background removal tool can make a huge impact on conversion by creating a clearer image of their product,” eBay wrote in a release announcing this tool.

EBay is No. 6 in the ranking of Digital Commerce 360 Top 100 Online Marketplaces.

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