
eBay launches visual search tools that let you shop using photos - dayve
https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/26/ebay-launches-visual-search-tools-that-let-you-shop-using-photos-from-your-phone-or-web/
======
averageweather
Some brilliant mind who lurks on HN should create a competitor to eBay. Not
some online yard sale where you have to meet people in person for the
exchange, but a nice online marketplace for people to sell their stuff.

If this already exists, do tell.

In my opinion, eBay for sellers (outside of maybe the power sellers. I've sold
<100 items) is a nightmare.

I sold a Tiffany necklace a few months back. The buyer reported to eBay it was
fake and I was ordered to refund the seller and they could keep the fake item.
Long story short, over a span of a few weeks, I was lucky enough to get an
original receipt from Tiffany and supply it as evidence, which almost still
did not work.

More recently, I listed an old iPhone with a "buy it now". Sold in like 30
minutes to someone with an "@god[dot].com" email requesting I send the phone
first and then he will pay me. It took a week or longer for me to challenge
this. I even have settings to disallow certain types of eBay users based on
ratings etc. eBay still charged me a listing fee.

I had success doing a non buy it now sale after that. Maybe that is my only
option now.

I don't even feel like getting into how slow their seller admin tools are ...

~~~
SamPatt
>If this already exists, do tell.

Yes, it does exist, and it's completely open source. It's called OpenBazaar,
and it's a fully decentralized marketplace. There's no middlemen at all.

[https://www.openbazaar.org/](https://www.openbazaar.org/)

It's backed by the OB1 company, which has raised $4.25 million from a16z, USV,
and BlueYard.

It uses IPFS so that stores don't go offline, and all payments are settled in
Bitcoin.

We love code reviews and pull requests. The back end is done in Go:

[https://github.com/OpenBazaar/openbazaar-
go](https://github.com/OpenBazaar/openbazaar-go)

The front end is an Electron app:

[https://github.com/OpenBazaar/openbazaar-
desktop](https://github.com/OpenBazaar/openbazaar-desktop)

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Being a desktop application is a pretty serious barrier to usability for the
average person. So is using Bitcoin, to be honest.

~~~
mustacheemperor
Bitcoin is an accessibility barrier, but OpenBazaar is also an example of the
kind of models bitcoin reduces the hurdles for.

~~~
hippich
it is certainly a barrier, but if sellers recognize that sales over bitcoin
has lower costs (cost of fraud) - certain items should show up on these
marketplaces and people knowing about that tech will be really happy to get
bargains... or so it should work :)

------
pkamb
I thought the title said "let you STOP using photos (when selling)", which is
what has basically already happened due to the prevalence of stock images and
CGI items on a white background.

I'm still looking for the browser extension that lets you filter out any
listing with a pure white or gradient background from your eBay, etsy,
pinterest, etc. searches.

Would be a HUGE indicator of an actual real used item sold by a human, vs. a
new dropshipped item from China. You know, what I want to use eBay to buy.

~~~
hippich
Amazon for example requires you to put picture on white background. They do
not actively enforce it, but if someone complains - they will remove picture
which does not fit their requirements.

~~~
pkamb
Makes sense for Amazon, which is mainly a store for new items / open box used
items. Don't care about pictures of the _actual_ item.

If I'm buying vintage/antique items on etsy or eBay I want to see the real
item, not a stock photo.

------
contingencies
I'm pretty sure Taobao in China has had this for ages. Search suggests[0]
since as early as 2011. To test it, go to Taobao[1] and click the photo icon
at the right of the search box (previously only available in some countries
and product categories, now apparently global). If this was the other way
around it would be "OMG China is copying the west!" No such discussion the
other way around. Just sayin'...

[0] [https://www.chinainternetwatch.com/1189/taobao-imagine-an-
im...](https://www.chinainternetwatch.com/1189/taobao-imagine-an-image-search-
engine-for-shoppers/)

[1] [http://www.taobao.com/](http://www.taobao.com/)

~~~
leggomylibro
Sort of; they also have links to visually-similar items if you hover over a
listing, if there are the 'right' amount of matching products.

I mean, how many relevant listings are you going to find for a stock photo of
a 7x7mm QFP32 chip? Still, that's a risky thing to buy on taobao anyways, and
it is useful for things like specifically-shaped buttons, connectors, etc.

------
CamelCaseName
I have been trying to use Amazon's visual search for the past week or two and
out of many trials, it has only worked once.

I wonder whether eBay will beat Amazon in this category as the types of photos
they have access to (amateur/home vs. professional/stock) are very different.
Either way, I am not confident that taking a picture is a better solution than
just typing in the name for the vast majority of items.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
>Either way, I am not confident that taking a picture is a better solution
than just typing in the name for the vast majority of items.

It's a great solution for "I want another one like this one but searching for
it returns 10000 different items"

~~~
CamelCaseName
That seems like a rare case to me. Typically there's a company name or model
number somewhere on the item, and often that identifier returns a very
specific item.

Looking around my house, I only see a few items that don't have unique
identifiers like furniture or plates/utensils. However, I suspect the majority
of things sold through Amazon/eBay are more likely to be video games, books,
toys, etc. with very visible and highly unique names.

~~~
tom_pinckney
Consider fashion or home goods. Frequently you see something you like based on
pattern, texture etc that cannot be easily described in words. Image search is
the perfect fit for these kinds of purchases.

------
dboreham
My pet startup idea, going back I suppose 15+ years is a service that does
this:

You have something. You like it. You want another one. The service gets it for
you. This doesn't have to work from a picture -- it could use a UPC barcode or
a text description.

Idea originally inspired by a school friends of mine who wore the exact same
type of boots for years and years. When the old pair wore out, he'd buy
another pair the exact same.

Over the years I've noticed many instances where I really want another one of
something I have but it turns out to be either painful or impossible to find.
You know however that somewhere someone has a warehouse full of the things.

Also like the electronics industry brokers who can track down an old component
for you to repair gear or re-start manufacturing on some old product. Those
have existed since at least the 1970's.

A few years ago I tested Amazon's visual product search feature to see if it
would do what I wanted. It didn't. I showed an image of some brown boots I was
wearing, and certainly the suggested products were also brown boots, but not
the same kind.

~~~
whoisjuan
I would totally use this. 8 years ago I bought a pair of Nike shoes in Paris.
I loved those shoes. I tried millions of things to buy a similar pair but I
was unsuccessful at finding them.

Maybe the service should be like FlightFox, but for people who are really good
at finding stuff. You pay a commission to the individual who helps you find
the item.

~~~
thess24
I've been building an automated service very similar to this for womens
fashion (mens fashion soon) in my free time over the past 5 months using deep
learning. The goal is to index existing items, and then expand to items that
are no longer available. So you could take a picture of your
shoes/shirt/hat/etc and it would ideally find the same one. If it doesn't find
the same exact item, it would find similar items at different price points
that you could buy. Getting similar items isn't that hard -- getting the exact
item is much trickier though. With the pace of improvement in these types of
models, there will probably be a lot of these types of apps popping up over
the next few years.

------
lolsal
It seems like ebay would have a ton of user-provided photos which would be a
possibly _huge_ corpus for machine learning to help identify objects like
this. It will be interesting to see how well this works!

~~~
bflesch
The yellow sofa example in the article looked very convincing.

------
syntaxing
I know a bunch of sites has this feature already but I'm pretty excited to try
it out since eBay is probably the website with the best dataset. I do not
think any other site has as many home taken pictures as eBay. This would
definitely make the image recognition much more robust. I'm guessing the
problem with Amazon or TaoBao is that most of the pictures are studio pictures
and does not scale well when a person takes a picture in a random environment.

That being said though, the eBay buying and selling experience is a hit or
miss. It sucks how there is group of people preying on the site to rip people
off. I had an selling experience so bad that I vouched never to sell anything
via eBay anymore. Craiglist tends to be a much better transaction.

------
conceptoriented
To test a machine learning algorithm, one can use "Fashion-MNIST":
[https://github.com/zalandoresearch/fashion-
mnist](https://github.com/zalandoresearch/fashion-mnist)

"Fashion-MNIST is a dataset of Zalando's article images—consisting of a
training set of 60,000 examples and a test set of 10,000 examples. Each
example is a 28x28 grayscale image, associated with a label from 10 classes.
We intend Fashion-MNIST to serve as a direct drop-in replacement for the
original MNIST dataset for benchmarking machine learning algorithms. It shares
the same image size and structure of training and testing splits."

------
dsfyu404ed
Seems like a great way for eBay to undercut brick and mortar stores (and for
consumers to save money) on cheap junk from China that people would rather pay
$0.99 and wait 3wk for than pay $4.99 and have right now.

~~~
icebraining
Also dropshippers who resell such Chinese products under different names for a
margin.

------
dessant
I have made a browser extension[1][2] for those looking to perform reverse
image searches with multiple engines at once. It's more reliable than Chrome's
built-in image search, which appears in the context menu only for <img>
elements, while this extension parses the clicked area to extract images.
Support for shopping sites may come in the future.

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/search-by-
image/cn...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/search-by-
image/cnojnbdhbhnkbcieeekonklommdnndci)

[2] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/search_by_ima...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/search_by_image/)

------
addictedcs
Interesting how we built a raw prototype about eight months ago
([https://imgur.com/OIaQu7x](https://imgur.com/OIaQu7x)), but it never took
off (at least for the customer whom we've pitched). To add to other's
comments, the visual search can be quite useful comparing to terms search
specifically for non-native speakers and people who are not skilled in fashion
terms (i.e., the name of the material, pattern). As for how accurate it is,
this is indeed an existing problem. If you product set is significant (>10k
products), then the visual search results can be entirely off the target, not
surprised Ebay is dealing with the same problem.

~~~
zepolen
I didn't find that surprising since your blue bag results in the demo returned
a bunch of bags that didn't look at all like the original.

~~~
addictedcs
The fuzziness was added on purpose in a way to recommend you products you may
be interested in (not necessarily the exact match).

~~~
zepolen
You won't succeed in business if your response to feedback is defensive and
you don't even try to get to know your target user.

Your reply _should_ have been 'oh really, why is that?'.

------
martinshen
Can someone explain to me why eBay is trading only at 5.5x P/E? I fully
understand that it isn't growing tremendously but with all its classified
assets, I can't help but feel that it should be trading at a much higher
market cap.

~~~
jk2323
Interesting point. But p/e so long, and they are never paying dividends, what
is happening with that money?

I don't think of ebay highly, desides what they did to Craigslist.

They had Skype. They could have been Facebook, but no. They had Paypal. With
Skype and paypal they could have easily made micropayments on cell phones, but
no. I hardly ever see a company with so many wasted chances. They are in a
"winner takes it all" niche but sooner or later someone (Open Bazaar?) will
challenge them and I don't see any innovation from this company.

------
482794793792894
Last weekend, my dad needed new printer cartridges and so we went sifting
through the internet for different offerings. By chance, we got onto a page on
the manufacturer's website, which had images of all their cartridge packs.
Among those, we also found an XL version of what we initially thought to buy.

So, there we were, needing exactly this feature. If I didn't know that it's
impossible for them to have developed this in such a short time, I'd be a
little freaked.

Thankfully, though, TinEye served the exact same purpose...

------
tegansnyder
Can anyone recommend a good tutorial or reading on how to setup content-based
(visual) image searching using a CNN to process images. I'm looking to build a
POC of a reverse image search trained with in-house product data. In the past
I've used the imgSeek but it is dated and not using neural nets.

~~~
dahernan
For a POC you could use Tagbox, just a REST API packed as a Docker container
from [https://machinebox.io](https://machinebox.io), here the blog post
[https://blog.machinebox.io/visual-search-by-machine-box-
eb30...](https://blog.machinebox.io/visual-search-by-machine-box-eb30062d8abe)

Disclaimer: I did both of them so, I'm a little bias :)

------
adityapatadia
We provide similar technology as a service if anyone is interested to hire us.
Check our demo at:
[https://app.turingiq.com/demo/image/client](https://app.turingiq.com/demo/image/client)

------
introvert
Surprisingly, it works well. I tried searching for few items and it showed
similar items on ebay..

------
ll931110
Shameless plug for my friend's startup, which has prototyped the concept and
got a few customers for the last year.

[https://www.mirrorthatlook.com/](https://www.mirrorthatlook.com/)

------
zokier
It would be interesting if they'd use this tech to deduplicate the gazillion
listings for many cheap (chinese) goods which seem to use common set of images
with maybe varying watermarks etc.

------
blntechie
Just adding - AliExpress has had similar feature for more than a year when I
started using it. It doesn’t work really well though.

------
searchers
As I understood, there are 2 different apps: "Find it" and "Image search". If
yes, .. why?

------
incan1275
Happen to know that is the work of the eBay team in New York. Really great
engineers in that lab.

------
ecommerceguy
I wonder if I snap a fake rolex it will find an actual fake rolex.

------
jasonkostempski
Someone's been watching Big Bang Theory reruns.

------
eurticket
Pintrest should've hit this first.

~~~
thess24
Pinterest does have something similar and has a few blog posts about how they
did it

------
Kiro
How can I use this from desktop?

