Enhancing eBay's Visual Shopping Experience With Automated Image Generation And Optimization For Themes and Categories
eBay category pages were represented by plain text rather than images; generating a category image required a curator or designer to manually create one—a time-intensive process requiring extensive resources that could not quickly adapt to emerging trends or scale to thousands of categories.
How it works
Common implementation structure
How this type of workflow is generally built, generalized across documented cases — not tied to any one vendor's stack. Click any stage to read what happens there. Specific products that implement these stages appear in “Tools commonly seen” below.
Stage 1 · Sample popular item titles
Popular item titles belonging to each category or theme are sampled, with popularity determined by click through rate.
Tools used
Multimodal Generative AImultimodal LLMsLarge Vision Model
Outcome
Human evaluators confirmed that 88% of AI-generated images were suitable for use on eBay, demonstrating a scalable approach to producing high-quality, category-specific visuals with minimal manual intervention and reduced resource demands compared to traditional curation.
What failed first
In initial trials of the automated generation system, non-deterministic generative models produced problematic variations including distorted objects, unexpected random objects, and dark or blurred images that did not meet quality standards.