EBay Banks on Bar Codes for a Comeback
The online marketplace must manage an enormous inventory.
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Hoping to outgrow its image as a glorified garage sale and move up in Google searches, EBay is turning to technology developed 70 years ago: the bar code. The machine-readable symbol that keeps supermarket lines moving is helping EBay manage vast amounts of data associated with the 6 billion products—from smartphones to video games, handbags to tires—listed at the online marketplace each year.
Merchants will be able to enter a full description of a sales item by using a smartphone camera to scan its Universal Product Code. EBay reads the scan and automatically lists the item’s specifications. Before, every detail, including brand, model, and dimensions, was entered manually.