eBay processes 1M+ customer insights in real-time
eBay slashed feedback triage from weeks to minutes and cut issue resolution time to days with AI-native workflows in ProductCentral.
>90%
Faster feedback triage
1M+
Customer insights handled instantly
3x
reduction in feedback to launch time
Whether it’s a rare collectible or an everyday essential, eBay connects millions of buyers and sellers in over 190 markets worldwide. Since its founding in 1995, it has grown into one of the largest and most dynamic online marketplaces, creating opportunities for individuals, entrepreneurs, and businesses of all sizes. With ProductCentral, eBay now captures, understands, and acts on customer feedback in real time, transforming how teams work and setting the stage for a company-wide rollout of actionable insights.
The challenge: Diverse customers, massive feedback, and long delays
As Director of Product Operations at eBay, Angela Yanes stepped into a world of complexity: a global marketplace with wildly varied customers, fragmented tools, and a tidal wave of feedback.
“We’re customer obsessed, but with so many different types of customers, it was incredibly difficult to get the right feedback to the right teams quickly,” says Yanes.
The advertising division introduces more than 200 projects annually, triggering thousands of pieces of feedback in multiple languages and formats. Turning this flood of data into actionable insights was slow and labor-intensive, often requiring support from product marketing, product management, and engineering to interpret comments and manage triage. Collecting feedback from various sources, translating it, tagging it, and routing it to the right owner took three to four weeks just to organize.
But that was just the start — the bigger challenge was analyzing it, identifying trends, extracting themes, and making actionable recommendations. This could take months, with full resolution sometimes stretching to nine months.
“I found more than 90 documents of all the products we were launching just in the advertising organization,” she recalls. “There was no source of truth. We had other tools, but nothing that could handle the intricacies of our internal workflows.”
The solution: Turning vision into reality with AI-powered platform from Airtable
With ProductCentral as the foundation, Yanes’ team built a system to connect customer insights, product strategy, and team-level execution in one place. The change has elevated how teams capture, understand, and act on customer feedback — laying the groundwork for an organization-wide rollout that will put actionable insights into the hands of every team across the business.
Every piece of feedback — whether it comes through surveys, account managers, customer support tickets, community forums, or social media — flows into ProductCentral. AI automatically tags and categorizes submissions, distinguishing bugs from feature requests, and translates them in real time. Thematic analysis surfaces patterns and priorities, flagging exact areas requiring attention to product managers.
When a bug is confirmed, ProductCentral’s integration with Jira creates an engineering ticket instantly, assigning it to the right team without manual intervention. Automations route feature requests and insights to the appropriate product owners, ensuring nothing is lost in the shuffle.
By combining AI-powered insight generation with integrations and automations, Airtable has given eBay a workflow that is both faster and more insightful, turning millions of unstructured data points into clear, prioritized actions in seconds.
“What used to take months, AI is doing in real time,” says Yanes. “Our teams can focus on higher-value work instead of sorting through endless data.” This includes product managers and engineers, who no longer need to interpret feedback or help triage manually.
“When you start small, prove the impact, and have allies, adoption happens naturally. Now, everyone’s asking for Airtable.”
Just as importantly, this shift directly improves the experience for buyers and sellers on eBay. With ProductCentral as a real-time customer insights engine, customers see their concerns addressed more quickly, product improvements delivered sooner, and more opportunities for their input to shape the eBay experience.
4 weeks to immediate feedback triage time so teams can act on insights right away
8+ months faster delivery of fixes and enhancements to buyers and sellers
1M+ pieces of feedback turned into actionable insights
Improves product quality as AI surfaces patterns and insights that might otherwise be overlooked
Addresses a greater share of customer voices
Higher confidence in prioritization ensuring the most impactful improvements reach customers first
"Airtable helps us act faster, prioritize smarter, and deliver better experiences to buyers and sellers.”
Expanding the reach of AI across eBay
For Yanes and her team, the next step is to extend these capabilities beyond the advertising division, creating a unified, AI-driven feedback loop across all of eBay. The company already relies on Airtable for annual planning and roadmapping, and connecting its voice of customer workflow directly into these processes will further shorten decision cycles and improve the quality of prioritization. AI-powered insights will also ensure valuable feedback flows straight into development plans.
“Airtable makes it easy to deliver AI insights to every team quickly and without complex builds.”
Other enhancements include automated Slack alerts for product owners when new high-priority items are detected, as well as AI-assisted drafting of product requirement documents to accelerate planning. By scaling Airtable’s combination of AI features, integrations, and automations across the company, every team — from engineering to marketing — will be able to act on customer insights in real time, shaping products and experiences faster than ever, and delivering even more of the things people love.