Category: Engineering

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Background In 2019, eBay started an initiative to upgrade the monitoring platform to handle increased monitoring signals. We decided to make these upgrades in order to cope with the vast number of queries our system encounters, which in turn revealed several engineering challenges to be overcome. The new platform, Sherlock.io, aligns with the Prometheus tech […]

Background Last year, eBay Ads launched a new campaign type, Promoted Listings Express (PLX), which lets eBay sellers boost visibility for their auction-style listings with just a few clicks and a single, flat, upfront fee. Over the past year, our research team worked to optimize how we merchandise these promoted auction items. The way in […]

eBay attracts buyers for its wide selection and value, and for the global connection provided by the comprehensive marketplace. That connection between the buyer and seller can be hugely beneficial for engagement, but buyers would prefer to not be bombarded with unorganized, unwanted communication. Sellers want an easy way to engage with their buyers, which […]