Tech Blog Archive

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 Engineering

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 Engineering

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
Developer Tools in Engineering

OpenFeature, With Contributions From eBay, Submitted to CNCF's Sandbox Program

The new open feature flagging standard enables companies to deliver cloud-native applications more effectively.

By: Justin Abrahms, Principal Architect, Chair of eBay's Open Source Program
Competitions in Engineering

eBay’s 3rd University Machine Learning Competition: Predicting Shipping Delivery Dates

For our annual ML competition, we challenged university students to predict how many days a carrier takes to deliver packages.

By: Uwe Mayer, Senior Applied Researcher
Advertising in Engineering

Improving Shopping Recommendations for Customers Through eBay’s Relevance Cascade Model

Under the new machine learning model, buyers are recommended items that are more aligned to their shopping interests on eBay.

By: Chen Xue, Applied Researcher
Deep Learning in Engineering

Building a Deep Learning Based Retrieval System for Personalized Recommendations

A step-by-step guide on how to build a state-of-the-art recommender system in an industrial setting.

By: Yuri M. Brovman
Developer Tools in Engineering

How eBay Developed an Automatic Testing Solution for Batch Application Upgrades

A look at how our eBay technologists created an automatic testing solution for batch applications.

By: Paul Zhang and Tao Jin