A few years ago, way back in 2009, Hunch.com was launched and has been quite successful since its premier. The team behind Hunch.com created an innovative site that was based off of data mining, predictive modeling, and machine learning. It used all of the data it collected in order to recommend things that the members would like. Its patented technology was innovative enough to catch the eyes of one of the biggest names on the Internet: eBay.
eBay is one of the leading sites to buy and sell online. Not only can customers buy and sell items, but they can sell cars, and even property! Due to the vast expanse of people eBay serves, they are constantly looking to increase their ability to deliver more to their customers. This has resulted in eBay completely overhauling their website, releasing an extensive amount of mobile apps, and has also pushed them to hire innovative employees from such places as Microsoft and Facebook; eBay intends to find out more on how customers work with their site and what makes people buy a particular item.
It was because of eBay’s insatiable desire to increase functionality and sales, eBay has recently turned its attention to Hunch.com and their innovative technology they use to bring recommended items to users based on what they previously liked. eBay has previously lacked this technology and was one of the deciding factors in their decision.
eBay recently released a press release on November 21 stating that they were proud to announce their acquisition of Hunch.com. While none of the in depth details have been released, it is known that eBay is going to keep the team behind Hunch.com and will also use their technology to help further eBay’s advertising and marketing.
In the press release from eBay earlier they stated that Hunch would significantly help eBay and its customers because of its ability to “generate meaningful, yet often non-obvious, recommendations for items available on eBay based on their specific tastes.”
eBay plans on using Hunch’s advanced mining tool to monitor shopper’s actions outside of eBay (such as on Facebook and Twitter) and it is going to incorporate that into a new tool that eBay has been working on for the past year. This tool, called Discover, brings up results to the user after funneling data and information through a complex algorithm. Together eBay hopes that the two tools will “move beyond standard item-to-item recommendations” and allow users to see products that are suggested to them based on a wide variety of members tastes and interests.
The future for both eBay and Hunch look bright as they work together to bring a new and innovative product recommendation feature to the popular website. Despite eBay acquiring Hunch.com, reports say that Hunch will still operate as its own website while the team behind Hunch.com will be working with eBay.
When will these new tools be seen on eBay? As for that it is still unknown however eBay is already testing out Discover and will surely optimize their site as soon as they can with Hunch’s advanced tools.
