eBay Adds AI Captions & Scheduling To Social Sharing Tool
UPDATE 12-19-23
eBay has finally officially announced AI captions for the social sharing tool, including auto-posting "coming soon."
This feature is fully available in the US, UK, Germany, and Australia, allowing sellers to share individual listings, categories, promotions, and stores. We’re seeing a great response from early users...
...Coming soon is an additional enhancement — auto-posting. Sellers will be able to choose to automatically post their listings to social media as soon as the listing is published, with no additional action needed.
This is just one more way eBay is leveraging innovative technology to help connect people and build communities to empower economic opportunity for all.
eBay has added generative AI capability and scheduling to Social sharing tool, giving sellers more ways to optimize their social media sharing to drive traffic.
VP Seller Experience announced these new features would be "coming soon" at eBay Open in September.
We know the job of selling doesn't stop at listing creation. Every seller I've met has talked about the importance of driving traffic to their listings so earlier this year we introduced a new tool that's seamlessly integrates your
social accounts with your selling account. This way it's much easier for
you to share your listings on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest......and we aren't stopping there we're enabling the ability to schedule posts and share multiple listings at a time we're even working on a capability that will allow you to use generative AI to help write captions for your social posts. Hashtag awesome
Here's how it works:
Navigate to the Social tool through Seller Hub and connect your social media accounts.
When creating a social media post, you'll be able to select items or categories to feature as well as create your own caption or use the new AI caption generator to make suggestions.
The AI feature will create multiple suggestions - pick your favorite and go or edit if needed and of course, always double check the accuracy of any information generated by AI tools.
If you want to prepare posts in advance, you can also use the new scheduling feature to make sure your posts are shared at the most opportune time to drive traffic to your listings.
eBay launched this Social tool earlier this year for Store subscribers before opening it up to all sellers in September, but the feature has run into problems as social media platforms have begun restricting or monetizing API access.
The tool originally supported Twitter/X as well as Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest but that was disabled due to API changes implemented by Elon Musk in July.
Facebook access was also temporarily lost due to updated API requirements in September, but eBay was able to resolve those issues and reconnect the service.
Liz Morton
While the AI caption generator and scheduling are nice features, many sellers are still disappointed eBay never followed through with the discounted final value fee social sharing incentive ex-VP Stores Tom Pinckney teased at eBay Open in 2021.
Liz Morton
Tom said eBay would be adding a social media marketing incentive that would discount the final value fee to 2.5% + $0.30 per transaction when buyers buy from your social media posts, but so far the program has not been launched in the US and eBay has provided no updates on the status of this initiative.
eBay did do a test run of the program in Australia for sellers with Basic, Feature or Anchor Store subscriptions from 26th July 2022 to 30th September 2022, but again there have been no updates since that test ended.
Liz Morton ~ Founder
Meanwhile, Etsy has beat eBay to the punch, introducing their Share & Save program which offers a 4% discount on fees for qualifying sales made through links shared on social media and across the web - effectively making the commision fee 2.5%, just like eBay had promised and failed to deliver.
Liz Morton
Of course many sellers on both eBay and Etsy have wondered why they should drive traffic to those sites where they pay commission fees instead of driving traffic to their own websites or making sales directly through social media channels where they get to keep more of the sale by cutting out the middleman.
Do you use eBay's Social tool to create social media posts and drive traffic to your listings? Let us know in the comments below what you think of the new AI caption generator and scheduling feature!
