eBay Launches AI Powered Image Background Enhancing Tool In App
eBay's AI powered background enhancer is here, allowing sellers to place items on a variety of generated backdrops for more professional looking presentation.
The new feature was first demoed at the 2024 Spring Seller Check In in March, by Senior Product Manager, Seller Experience, Morgan Chen.
...powered by generative AI you now can add some colored backdrop or...you can also put your items in a scene, like here we put that pair of shoes on the road or on the hiking trail to demonstrate how or where your items can be used, all with a few clicks in app, no expensive equipments or setup needed.
Let's take a look at a real example of a listing photo. After removing the background, now you'll choose where you want to put your item. It can be in the studio, on the countertop, or some creative locations. AI gives you a few generated photos to choose from...if you don't find anything that you like, you can continue tweaking the prompt and generate more.
For years, sellers have been told white backgrounds were very important for search optimization because Google and other search engines might reject product listings that did not have a plain, white background, but Chen says that's no longer true and the goal should be to pick a simple background that provides the best contrast to show the true color of an item.
Today's official press release from eBay says the background enhancer is currently only available in the iOS app for US, UK, and Germany and will be expanded to Android "in the coming months" but I am already able to access it in the Android app, version 6.162.0.2.
Now when you add photos, the icon that would normally just remove the background and leave it white allows you to select Studio, Surface, or Outside AI generated options as well.
In my experience the process was very laggy & often failed to load, requiring multiple attempts.
If you get an image to generate, most of the results aren't bad, but I'm not sure I'd use this feature vs other image editing tools available, whether AI assisted or not.
Also, as previously noted when eBay initially added AI to the background removal tool last year, there is no way to fine tune the initial cropping/cutting functionality - which in this case would have been handy to remove the pen from the picture.
Full eBay AI background enhancement demo:
Users report one minor issue with the tool if you want to use it to create just a clean, white background - that option appears to make the background black instead of white.
The remove background tool seems to work for studio, surface, and outside, but when you select white it turns background totally black. There isn't even a black background selection. Seems to work ok on my laptop. It has been like this for a few days. Not sure if they are still updating or unaware there is an issue.
That would seem to backup my suspicion that a glitch sellers were seeing back in April may have been related to testing or an initial rollout of this feature.
Liz Morton
Sellers are also currently experiencing issues with the desktop listing form that may or may not be related to pushing this update to the app listing experience live.
What do you think of eBay's "magical" AI background enhancing tool? Let us know in the comments below!
