eBay’s Collaboration with Mashable on Shoppable Images is Just The Beginning

eBay’s recent partnership with media and entertainment website Mashable now brings shoppable images to the media company.

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Shopping tag icons placed on images in posts allow readers to search eBay for products featured on images directly. The feature is powered by the Image Search technology eBay released last year and is an extension of the Find-It-On-Ebay feature.

“We know a lot about how people shop on our site, but less about how they shop off it, so we wanted to bring a simplified shopping experience that brings products to Mashable’s passionate audience rather than expects them to come to us”

Dan Burdett, Head of eBay EMEA Marketing Lab

This latest eBay widget is a pilot program with Mashable from eBay’s Marketing lab, which focuses on disruptive marketing solutions and technologies.

With this pilot integration, the team hopes to learn what matters most, such as such as delivery times and seller reputations, to consumers when shopping off the eBay marketplace.

The data gathered from the test will likely be used to identify how to bring customers to the site best, and possibly create a new promotional option for subscribers to the eBay Partner Network.

The Concept of Shoppable Images

Last year, Target partnered with Pinterest on shoppable images to drive traffic to their website.

Amazon has also ventured into shoppable content with its launch of Spark, a content feature on its mobile app that lets user shop items they see in photos.

Image search is popping up in many different places. But the computing resources needed will likely mean that marketplaces and large-scale eCommerce sites will be the first to deploy newly advances in the technology.

While blogs, news sites, and other online publishers derive income from banner ads and affiliate links, the power of image search is very new.

Over time this can change how consumers shop as they search for products online and find an extensive write-up on independent blogs before making a purchase decision.

There is a massive potential for eCommerce to benefit from image search. And marketplaces such as eBay may be the best way for SMEs to take advantage of this powerful technology.

Over time, we expect to see third-party integrations for eCommerce platforms such as Magento, Volusion, or Shopify as well. This could be made available through affiliate marketing networks such as CJ.com or Rakuten Linkshare.

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