At today’s Google Next Cloud conference, eBay’s RJ Pittman and Google’s Diane Greene showed off a demo of eBay’s chatbot service on the Google Home device.
At the event eBay announced they are now a Google cloud customer, potentially moving away from Microsoft’s Azure platform. Or are they hedging their bet and we will see a Cortana eBay chatbot soon…
In the demonstration, RJ Pittman, eBay’s chief product officer, asked Google Home to talk to eBay. Pittman then told the eBay chatbot that he owned a Canon camera, and after a brief description of (item) specifics information, the eBay chatbot came up with a value for the camera.
With Amazon taking Alexa to new shopping heights, it only makes sense for eBay to partner with Amazon’s biggest competitor to date in the voice command market.
Google has the resources to bring a lot of innovation and technology to voice command search, but it will have to catch up to Amazon’s Alexa shopping chops.
Very likely, eBay will be just one of many new shopping services to Google Home, but this could be become an important tool for small eCommerce businesses utilizing the eBay marketplace.
If you are not getting ready for voice search, your competitors will be working on it.
Clearly in this demo, eBay was showing off how quickly a novice user could create a listing and put the product up for sale.
It is a big part of eBay’s pitch right now to highlight the ease of use of eBay for sellers because in the long run this means eBay will attract more buyers.
And that brings us now to the inevitable important point that if you still have not given your listings enough love on Item Specifics, do it now.
Item Specifics are being used in mobile search, they are becoming a larger part of comparison shopping on eBay’s main site, and now with a shopping bot system in the works, they will play an important role for voice searches as well.
Some futurists believe we will see voice search take over standard typed search within the next 5 years. A new dawn of searching may just be around the corner and eCommerce will need to change with it.
So how prepared are you? We love to hear your input on what you think it will take to make your products ready for voice search.
