A Lightweight Distributed Architecture to Handle Thousands of Library Releases at eBay

On eBay, there are lots of scenarios that require a distributed system. A typical use case is when a large amount of libraries are release. There are more than 3,000 legacy libraries still built by the old build system based on Ant, which is no longer supported. These libraries are now being migrated to a […]

Continue Reading

Expanding the eBay Ads Portfolio with Promoted Listings Express

Creating new opportunities for our sellers to grow their businesses further is a driving force of everything we do at eBay Ads. We continue to invest heavily in new technology to make it easier for sellers of all sizes to run their business online. Last September, we announced the launch of Promoted Listings AdvancedBETA, our […]

Continue Reading

Creating High-Quality Staging Data with a NoSQL Data Migration System

Editor’s note: This article follows “The Staging Dichotomy” series as a technical deep dive into data migration. eBay connects millions of buyers and sellers in more than 190 markets around the world to create economic opportunity for everyone, everywhere. As we continue to innovate on behalf of our customers, our team is focused on improving […]

Continue Reading

How eBay Developed an Automatic Testing Solution for Batch Application Upgrades

This article introduces a new testing methodology for 500+ batch applications at eBay. These batch applications contain 10,000+ jobs running everyday to handle offline eBay business, for example, the monthly invoice jobs are responsible to record all transactions on a customer’s primary account for subscriptions. In this piece, we explore the challenges of batch application […]

Continue Reading

Building a Deep Learning Based Retrieval System for Personalized Recommendations

At eBay, we have approximately 152 million users and 1.5 billion live listings at any given time on our marketplace. This article takes a look at how we’ve created an in-house system, using a combination of engineering and machine learning methodologies to develop personalized recommendations for our community.   The blog headline may sound daunting, but […]

Continue Reading

Improving Shopping Recommendations for Customers Through eBay’s Relevance Cascade Model

When shoppers come to eBay, our goal is to help them easily find a product they’ll love.  Over the past year, our teams have focused on how we can improve item recommendations for buyers that are more relevant and aligned to their shopping interests.  Under our previous recommendations model, products were displayed for customers on […]

Continue Reading

eBay’s 3rd University Machine Learning Competition: Predicting Shipping Delivery Dates

In ecommerce, different carriers tend to take different lengths of time to deliver packages. For our annual Machine Learning competition, we challenged university students to predict how many days a carrier takes to deliver packages. Our competition garnered over 1,100 submissions, from 843 students at 169 universities and colleges, over a six month period. Why […]

Continue Reading

OpenFeature, With Contributions From eBay, Submitted to CNCF’s Sandbox Program

eBay is committed to open source software, and as part of that commitment is pleased to join other industry leaders in submitting OpenFeature to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s sandbox program.  OpenFeature allows application developers to add feature flags into their code without being tied to any particular vendor. This allows common open source tooling […]

Continue Reading

Multi-Relevance Ranking Model for Similar Item Recommendation

Promoted Listings Standard (PLS) helps sellers’ items stand out among billions of listings on eBay. eBay offers several ways to surface PLS listings. One way is placing those items on the search result page at a higher rank, with a “sponsored” badge; another way is recommended by our PLS item recommendation engines on View Item […]

Continue Reading

How eBay Handles Real-Time Push Notifications at Scale

Streaming systems in event-driven microservice architecture are often compared with distributed data processing frameworks, such as Flink and Spark etc., in terms of technical design choices. At eBay, we have built a high-throughput event streaming platform in microservices architecture where eBay’s partners can subscribe to eBay’s business events such as product feeds updates, bid status […]

Continue Reading