Facebook Marketplace gets AI features like price suggestions, auto-categorisation

Facebook Marketplace, the social media giant’s Craigslist-like classified advertisements space just turned two and to celebrate its birthday, Facebook is adding a set of AI-powered features, engineered to make selling easier.

Whether it’s someone discovering an item to buy, listing a product to sell, or communicating with a buyer or seller, Facebook claims that AI will be working behind the scenes. AI algorithms baked into Marketplace will now help in adding price range suggestions and auto-categorise products and services to make selling easier. Facebook also says in a blog post that it is testing camera features that would be useful in making product recommendations.

Facebook Marketplace will now be able to categorise items based on what AI algorithms pick up from images and description of the product and then suggest a price range for the sellers to pick a price from. Quoting internal research findings, Facebook claims that once the autosuggest feature is enabled, sellers are less likely to abandon their listings, something which was a worry for Facebook. The company claims that as many as 9 percent of sellers abandoned listings before the feature was enabled.

The company is also planning to use AI to automatically enhance the quality of images uploaded by sellers and also for more complex actions like detecting and removing inappropriate content . With time, Facebook also plans on using AI features to let users take a photo of a product and then let Facebook Marketplace run a search of similar-looking products for purchase.

Though the ‘AI’ abbreviation has become a common catchphrase here, as pointed out by TechCrunch in a report , automating price suggestions and categorising products isn’t something were hearing of for the first time. But knowing Facebook’s financial capabilities, it can soon introduce more AI-powered features to overtake the likes of eBay and Craigslist.