AI Translation Has A Positive Impact On eBay's Sales

Saanvi Araav - May 29, 2019

Recent research has shown that AI has a positive impact on eBay's sales by helping sellers cross the language barrier.

These days, we often got to hear that artificial intelligence plays a very important role in economic growth. While that statement seems logical, there wasn't any hard proofs or data that could back it up. However, a recent study from the collaboration of Washington University in St. Louis and MIT has yielded data proving that AI tools have actually boosted trade by allowing traders to communicate beyond the language barrier.

Going over the data from eBay, the study has compared the sale figures between Latin American countries and the US on the platform. Specifically, they studied those figures after and before the application of the AI-powered translation for the product listings back in 2014.

Prior to this, the company was using an automatic translation tool but with AI, the accuracy of the service was improved significantly. And the researchers have found out that better translation has led to greater sales.

Ai Translation Has Big Positive Impact On Ebays Sa — The data shows an increase of 10% for the sale in the US and Latin American countries.

But then you would have to take into account other variables which could also lead to this increase as well. What they did was comparing this period's exports to countries whose spoken languages are not included in the translation tools of eBay. Another thing was controlling elements like length of title listings and increased marketing spend.

While comparing the data with eBay's AI translation tools for French, Italian, and Russian, they have found similar increases in sales. They estimate that the introduction of AI translation tools is bringing countries closer together by 26%, which influences trade volume positively.