Ebay headquarters in San Jose, California. The online giant announced the acquisition of SalesPredict, an Israeli startup. Photo: WikiCommons.

JNS.org – The online retail giant eBay on Monday announced the acquisition of SalesPredict, an Israeli start-up that predicts consumers’ buying behavior. It is believed that eBay agreed to pay between $30 million and $40 million for SalesPredict, although neither company released financial information on the transaction.

SalesPredict, which is based in Netanya, was founded in 2012. Its technology is a form of artificial intelligence that uses various techniques to study consumers’ buying habits through database analysis. eBay, which is a popular online marketplace that allows users to sell the products to each other and bid on them, has increased its presence in the Israeli high-tech sector over the years, and eBay Israel, which is also based in Netanya, employs hundreds of people. Part of the reason for buying SalesPredict was its ability to leverage “advanced analytics to predict customer buying behavior and sales conversion,” eBay said in a statement.

“For our buyers, it will help us better understand the price differentiating attributes of our products, and, for our sellers, it will help us build out the predictive models that can define the probability of selling a given product, at a given price over time,” the statement added.