EBay challenges Amazon with 'Grouped Listings'

Dive Brief:

EBay on Monday unveiled a Grouped Listings feature that, using machine learning, allows shoppers to see the most relevant results for any search, according to a post on the company's website. The new feature doesn’t apply to searches for apparel, or motors.
Once a user clicks into a product page, they can choose the condition (new, nearly new or used) and different price points, the company said. Shoppers can also search for similar products, offers, ratings and reviews, and explore buying guides.
Ebay also recently unveiled its toy sales data. Considering the popularly of Hatchimals and the Nintendo NES Classic at the holidays last year, the new Hatchimals Surprise and SNES Classic Edition are poised to do well again this year, along with Fingerlings, Luvabella, LOL Surprise, according to a report from Toy News.

Dive Insight:

Last year, eBay CEO Devin Wenig outlined eBay’s turnaround plan, noting at the time that its friction-free marketplace, where just about anything can be found for sale, also made several areas of e-commerce more complicated. Since then, eBay has announced a series of improvements to search, personalization and logistics that seem to be taking on Amazon, and emulating some of its approaches.

Some of that paid off early on: The holiday season last year helped bring two million additional active buyers across eBay's platforms in the quarter, for a total of 167 million global active buyers. Fourth quarter revenue rose 3.1% to $2.4 billion, and its marketplace revenue was up 4% in the quarter on a currency-neutral basis and flat on an as-reported basis.

The Grouped Listings feature, now active in the U.S, U.K., Germany and Australia, and coming soon to mobile, makes eBay’s search results much more Amazon-like. For many searches, users will see a "Group Similar Listings" button above their search results that condenses similar offerings, the company said.

That means a product search that yields 10,000 listings condenses over 10X into, say the 953 unique products those represent, according to the blog post. "We’ve also made the functionality 'smart,'" Jon Glick, VP of search product at eBay, said in the post. "The button will not appear in cases where most of the listings you’d see are unique like antique teapots."