Tech Blog Archive

Data Infrastructure and Services in Research

eBay VP Ishita Majumdar Featured in Diversity Woman Media’s Power 100 List

Ishita joins leaders in technology, transportation, retail, and medicine in Diversity Woman Media’s third annual list.

By: eBay News Team
Accessibility in Engineering

Introducing an Accessibility Linter for Marko: Shortening the Accessibility Testing Pipeline

Our goal: Help developers create better code, more efficiently, while maintaining accessibility for all.

By: Luke LaValva
Big Data in Engineering

How We Export Billion-Scale Graphs on Transactional Graph Databases

By leveraging Apache Spark, eBay Graph Database can export a graph with billions of vertices and edges.

By: Hongjiang Zhang, Jun Li, Hieu Nguyen and Flora Zhang
Machine Learning in Product

eBay’s first Chief AI Officer Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov Recognized in Insider’s AI 100 List

Nitzan’s work ensures that eBay can magically and responsibly deliver AI-powered experiences.

By: eBay News Team
Machine Learning in Product

eBay Exec on How Artificial Intelligence Will Bring a ‘Paradigm Shift’ to Ecommerce

Chief AI Officer Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov predicts how AI will transform the online shopping experience.

By: eBay News Team
Machine Learning in Engineering

Evolving Recommendations: A Personalized User-Based Ranking Model

We developed a ranking model to generate personalized recommendations that optimally ranks hundreds of candidate recommendations by considering a user’s shopping experience as well as platform performance objectives.

By: Yingji Pan, Bing Zhou and Yuri M. Brovman
Recommender Systems in Engineering

Beyond Words: How Multimodal Embeddings Elevate eBay's Product Recommendations

By integrating information from different modalities of eBay listings such as titles and images, we greatly improved the buyer experience and relevance of the recommended items on eBay’s listing pages.

By: Shibo Song, Lili Weng and Shawn Zhou
Security in Features

eBay’s Commitment to Responsible AI: Q&A With Dr. Anna Zeiter, Chief Privacy Officer, Associate General Counsel for Privacy, Data & AI

Why eBay sees responsible AI as a priority that can’t wait.

By: Dr. Anna Zeiter
User Experience in Features

‘Magical’ Listing Tool Harnesses the Power of AI to Make Selling on eBay Faster, Easier, and More Accurate

eBay’s new magical listing tool uses artificial intelligence to extrapolate details about listings from images. Sellers can list items with ease, and buyers can access more information about potential purchases.

By: eBay News Team
User Experience in Engineering

eBay Execs Talk Generative AI and Computer Vision at VentureBeat Transform Conference

Chief AI Officer Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov and Vice President of Seller Experience Xiaodi Zhang shared how AI will make life easier for sellers, buyers and employees.

By: Dan Nosowitz
Mobile in Features

Celebrating the 15th Anniversary of eBay’s Mobile App

There was, unbelievably, a time before apps.

By: Wyatt Webb, Director of Mobile Architecture
Machine Learning in Engineering

eBay Chief Technology Officer Mazen Rawashdeh Talks AI, Embracing Tech Disruption on Bloomberg Podcast

Mazen shared his perspective on emerging technology trends and how eBay is embracing the disruption, bringing new customer experiences powered by AI to the marketplace.

By: Dan Nosowitz
Developer Tools in Engineering

eBay’s Common Automation Solution for Platform Evolution

Here at eBay, we’ve crafted a brand new approach to automate platform evolution for all applications — one that provides a repeatable and reusable infrastructure to streamline evolution.

By: Paul Zhang and Tao Jin
Machine Learning in Engineering

eBay’s Blazingly Fast Billion-Scale Vector Similarity Engine

The Similarity Engine's use cases include item-to-item similarity for text and image modality and user-to-item personalized recommendations based on a user’s historical behavior data.

By: Santosh Shahane, Kui Yang, Leonard Dahlmann, Amarendra Belineni, Yan Sun, Shrivatsan Navalpakkam Rajagopalan and Pavel Petrushkov
Developer Productivity in Engineering

How eBay Modernized the Most Important Page on Our Platform

eBay's core page — the View Item page — gets 250 million views per day. Here's how we took on the task of modernizing it.

By: Lakshimi Duraivenkatesh, Ben Vesco and Saral Sukumar Jeyaseelan
Machine Learning in Engineering

How eBay's New Search Feature Was Inspired By Window Shopping

A new feature generates customer delight by using modern computer vision techniques to drive new search paradigms through visual discovery.

By: Senthilkumar Gopal, Shubhangi Tandon, Christopher Miller, Deepika Srinivasan, Rui Kong, Selcuk Kopru and Srinivas Bhagavathula
Accessibility in Features

How eBay Made Its New Accessibility Tool — And Made It Available to All

Several eBay teams worked together to create a plug-in that makes it easy to include accessibility in a design right from the start.

By: Dan Nosowitz
Developer Productivity in Engineering

Open-Source Contribution: New Maven Dependency Resolution Algorithm

It’s been effective at speeding up productivity, pushed to eBay, and contributed back to the open source community.

By: Eric Cai, Simon Wang and Caddie Song
Data Infrastructure and Services in Engineering

Variable Hub: Easier Data Integration for Risk Decisioning

A new risk data hub for decisioning can significantly boost variable time-to-market, with high performance under billions of query traffic.

By: Kan Lin, Jiwen Yan and Yuanyuan Tan
Microservices in Engineering

API Evolution Is a Challenge. Could Contract Testing Be the Solution?

Contract testing has grown in popularity in recent years with the widespread adoption of microservice architectures. In this article, we will share our experiences with contract testing at eBay.

By: Xiaoye Wang, Simon Wang, Daphne Huang, David Van Couvering and Qingyuan Liu
Competitions in Features

eBay Announces Winners of 4th Annual Machine Learning Challenge

Using the power of natural language understanding, these two students created fantastic solutions.

By: Dan Nosowitz
Advertising in Engineering

How eBay Created a Language Model With Three Billion Item Titles

By leveraging deep learning techniques to compare the titles of product listings, we greatly improved the relevance of our recommended items on eBay’s View Item page.

By: Chen Xue, Jesse Lute, Dan Schonfeld, Guoping Han and Leonard Dahlmann
Testing in Engineering

How eBay’s Notification Platform Used Fault Injection in New Ways

eBay’s notification platform team built a fault-tolerant, resilient system by injecting faults in the application level.

By: Wei Chen
Kubernetes in Engineering

Why and How eBay Pivoted to OpenTelemetry

eBay makes a crucial pivot to OpenTelemetry to better align with industry standards for Observability.

By: Vijay Samuel
Testing in Engineering

Increase A/B Testing Power by Combining Experiments

How the powerful meta-analysis method called "weighted z-test" can help eBay become more efficient.

By: Zezhong Zhang
Advertising in Engineering

New Buyer Groups Tool Brings Personalized Marketing to eBay Sellers

Sellers in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Australia, France, Italy and Spain now have access to Buyer Groups, a new tool which allows them to segment their buyers to drive more repeat business.

By: Parin Jogani and David Bernstein
Advertising in Engineering

Multi-Objective Ranking for Promoted Auction Items

Determining which promoted auction items to display in a merchandising placement is a multi-sided customer challenge that presents opportunities to both surface amazing auction inventory to buyers and help sellers boost visibility on their auction listings.

By: Ishaan Arora, Chen Xue, Jesse Lute and Dan Schonfeld
Machine Learning in Engineering

Sherlock.io: An Upgraded Machine Learning Monitoring System

Billions of queries require new, smarter alerting features.

By: Huai Jiang
Microservices in Engineering

eBay's Notification Streaming Platform: How eBay Handles Real-Time Push Notifications at Scale

A case study demonstrates how eBay's Notification Engineering team optimizes a streaming system in a microservice architecture to support high-throughput broadcast notifications.

By: Xiaoye Wang
Advertising in Engineering

Multi-Relevance Ranking Model for Similar Item Recommendation

Buyers reveal a whole range of behaviors and interests when they browse our pages, so we decided to incorporate these additional purchase intent signals into our machine learning model to improve the relevance of our recommended items.

By: Chen Xue, Rachel Vishnepolsky and Zhen Ge