eBay takes a page from Amazon -- Recommendations

The No. 1 driver of book sales on Amazon is keyword searches -- buyers looking for a title or author name.

But Amazon's crown jewel is recommendations. It's the No. 2 driver of book sales, and it can literally create demand for a book where none existed.

Right behind Amazon's recommendations is its customer review feature, where amateurs compete for "positive" votes from the community.

eBay, in a bid to spur more growth, is now trying to outdo Amazon on all these features. eBay is even paying people to write product reviews.

There's no doubt that good recommendations prompt sales. Look at Netflix. But will recommendations work on eBay? The software engineer who developed a recommendation system for Amazon's auction platform in the early 1990s, Greg Linden, has his doubts. As he recalls, Amazon quickly pulled the plug on auction recommendations because:

[I]t generated complaints from sellers who did not like competitors' items shown next to theirs.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. eBay's biggest vulnerability is it knows a lot about its sellers, but very little about the buyers.