AI Translation Boosted eBay Sales More Than 10 Percent

We often hear that AI is important for economic growth, and while that claim makes intuitive sense, there isn't a lot of hard data to back it up. A recent study [PDF] from economists at MIT and Washington University in St. Louis offers some proof, though, showing how AI tools boost trade by allowing sellers to cross the language barrier. From a report: Looking at data scraped from eBay, the researchers compared sales between the US and Spanish-speaking Latin American countries before and after the shopping platform introduced AI-powered translation for product listings in 2014. (Specifically, the translation tool affected the titles of listings and search queries, but not product descriptions.) Prior to this eBay offered automatic translation, but the use of AI significantly improved the service's accuracy. You would expect that better translations would lead to greater sales, and that's exactly what the researchers found. Their data showed that sales from the US to countries affected increased 10.9 percent after the launch of the tool.

Intl eBay sales... no thanks

[magarity]

For someone who sells the occasional item international shipping is a hassle with customs forms, etc. No thanks.

Re: Intl eBay sales... no thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

Selling your ass to international tourists is not in scope for this article.

Re:

[Rockoon]

subsidized by our postal service

Re:

[tlhIngan]

For someone who sells the occasional item international shipping is a hassle with customs forms, etc. No thanks.

Depends. Sometimes items are just hard to find outside the US, so you can immediately tell if a seller ships internationally. As in the domestic shipping product will get maybe 1/10th the price that the international shipping item would get.

And yes, I'm not making it up. For a lot of items, you can easily get double by supporting international shipping, but some items are rare enough (think US col

No, Msmash.

[Type44Q]

We often hear that AI is important for economic growth

No, Msmash; you do...

the rest of us know to tune it out. ;)

Maybe for english speaking countries

[Dirk Becher]

For everyone else who buys english titled stuff the attempted translations in the native language become something between annoying and hilarious.

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[besttext]

Therefore English translations should be generated by real humans instead of machine translations. Then they can be human-oriented, natural and fully understandable. This should be the next step for the refinement of eBay language options.