EBay app, a new update enables automatic recognition of trading cards

Who would have thought that over 150 years after baseball's first trading cards were printed in the late 1860s they would become cult and collectible items. Every minute, nearly 100 trading cards are sold on eBay, according to the company. So, to make the process more immediate and fluid, the Californian giant has decided to update its app with image recognition features that allow you to speed up the creation of your collectible card listings.

The new feature won't be available in the app until the end of April, but when it arrives, it will initially only support cards from Magic the Gathering, with support for those Pokémon e Yu-Gi-Oh! in May. Other collectible and sports card games will be supported later this year.

How the cool new feature works is pretty straightforward. Pointing a mobile device's camera at the card will display a list of potential matches in the eBay database which will include details such as the card title, type and rarity. If the search returns several options, the user will simply have to select the closest match and a form will be automatically filled in with all the details. This way the seller will be able to create an ad in half the time, reducing the amount of information that has to be entered manually.

Once all the default information has appeared on the screen, the user can add further details: conditions of the card, the requested price (including shipping and logistics costs) and product photos. It is a rather intelligent approach and, although we are not exactly sure that it will always be able to work with precision, perhaps one day it could become, thanks to a technology capable of directly exploiting artificial intelligence, an essential feature to sell one's objects in that vast (and constantly evolving) world that today we call e-Commerce.