California-based e-commerce platform, eBay that enables buying, selling and auctioning of goods has announced the acquisition of Israeli predictive analytics company, SalesPredict, to gain insights into customer buying behavior and sales patterns.
The financial and legal aspects of the deals remain undisclosed, however, post-acquisition, the company claims that a number of SalesPredict employeess will join eBay’s structured data organization.
According to eBay, the acquisition eyes to bolster its machine learning tech and artificial intelligence (AI) portfolio to compete with the likes of Amazon, Alibaba and Walmart. The move is the second big data acquisition by eBay announced in the last three months after the purchase of Expertmaker in May, 2016.
Yaron Zakai-Or, Co-Founder and CEO, SalesPredict will serve as the Director of Product Management, Technology, and Kira Radinsky, Co-Founder and CTO, SalesPredict, will be Director of Data Science & Chief Scientist for eBay’s Israeli Development Center in Netanya.
Zakai-Or said:
With more than 900 million listings on eBay, there is an enormous opportunity to extend our experience in machine learning and predictive analytics to help eBay identify important product attributes that can affect the price of a product. In partnership with eBay’s broader structured data team, we will help arm eBay sellers with more information about the value of items, ultimately helping to increase customer sales conversions.
“In founding SalesPredict, our vision was to bring about a major change in how business is conducted by unifying micro- and macro-economic predictions. Today, this vision has yielded state-of-the-art automated data science capabilities,” added Radinsky.
eBay’s structured data initiative includes collecting the data, processing and enriching the data and creating product experiences while SalesPredict’s learning engine will aid in inventory insights and suggest new items that the user might want to buy using earlier order history.
Amit Menipaz, Vice President and General Manager of Structured Data, eBay, said, “Agreement to acquire SalesPredict builds upon our recently completed acquisition of Expertmaker, marking another milestone for eBay in our plans to apply world class learning approaches to building the world’s most comprehensive product catalog and pricing guide.”
SalesPredict’s deep expertise in predictive analytics and machine learning will contribute to eBay’s structured data efforts. For our buyers, it will help us better understand the price differentiating attributes of our products, and, for our sellers, it will help us build out the predictive models that can define the probability of selling a given product, at a given price over time.
Founded in 2012, SalesPredict claims to help B2B Marketing and Sales teams drive more revenue by identifying best potential prospects and accounts to target inbound and outbound marketing efforts more effectively.