Beni x AI: How we use GPT to figure out what you’re shopping for with Beni

Post 3 of 3 (until we do more) breaking down the role of generative AI in helping Beni deliver on its mission to make resale accessible to everyone.

When you’re shopping online with Beni, we need to figure out what you’re shopping for in order to deliver you relevant secondhand versions of that. When you’re on a merchant page (think Nike, Patagonia, etc.) we collect some product-level information from the page and use that information to perform a search. We look at the product image, the product title, the price, the brand, etc. and all of that is factored into our search and ranking algorithm (learn more about our ranking algorithm in our previous post).

Here’s a great visual example of the kinds of information that are relevant to us:

Our product catalog is similarly structured to how you might organize your closet - we have all of our pants in one “drawer”, all of our shirts in another, etc. When you are shopping for pants, and therefore we are looking for matching pants (but secondhand and for half the price), we don’t want to be searching through our whole catalog of 200M+ listings to find you that exact item because it would…