Etsy Accelerates AI Experimentation Thanks to Cloud
February 19 2020 - 4:08PM
Dow Jones News
By Sara Castellanos
Online crafts marketplace Etsy Inc. has doubled the number of
experiments on its website, including those involving data analysis
and machine learning, as moving to Alphabet Inc.'s Google Cloud has
given the company access to more computing power.
Last year, the Brooklyn, N.Y., company ran several hundred
experiments every quarter, more than double the levels in 2018,
said Chief Technology Officer Mike Fisher.
Such experiments determine how best to sort product reviews or
how to alert potential customers when a particular item might be
snapped up by someone else, with the goal of nudging people to buy
the handmade and vintage wares available on its website.
The experiments eat up a lot of computing power, which Etsy now
gets through Google Cloud instead of relying on its own
infrastructure. Before the shift to the cloud, creating and running
data science experiments could take several days or weeks and now
they can be done in a few hours.
"Now, our engineers can run the data, get it processed and be
ready to train their models in a day or two. The speed of
innovation is so much faster now," Mr. Fisher said.
The recently completed move to Google Cloud, announced in 2017,
was partly motivated by the company's interest in ramping up
experiments involving machine learning, the science of getting
computers to act intelligently without being programmed.
The shift allowed Etsy to not renew its contracts with two data
centers and cut its number of servers to a few hundred from a total
of 3,000, Mr. Fisher said.
Etsy's website carries more than 65 million items from more than
2.5 million sellers. Before the move to the cloud, Etsy had
purchased the servers and computing power it needed to run its
website about once a year, making it difficult to plan for tests
engineers would want to run. It wasn't cost effective to buy extra
computing power that would likely remain idle in hopes of running
future tests, Mr. Fisher said.
Other businesses across industries have also shifted to the
cloud. Previously, companies that managed their own IT
infrastructure stored data across various systems and units, which
made information difficult to analyze, said Chirag Dekate, senior
research director at research firm Gartner Inc.
Another benefit of the cloud is that engineers who were in
charge of maintaining back-end servers and hardware infrastructure
are now freed up for other tasks, Mr. Dekate said. They can help
develop new apps, IT systems or artificial-intelligence projects
that directly benefit customers and therefore add more value for
the business, he added.
At Etsy, about 75 of its 500 engineers have been reallocated
from infrastructure management to coding and software tasks that
have a direct impact on customer-facing initiatives such as the
website, Mr. Fisher said.
"Our customers don't care if we're the best in the world at
supporting hardware. They care about us having the best
marketplace, with the functionality and features they want," Mr.
Fisher said.
Because of the cloud, Etsy can now run various search
experiments with more data to inform the algorithms. For example,
software engineers have recently tested different variations of
nudges on the website to see which ones might be most effective in
persuading a customer to buy a product, Mr. Fisher said.
A nudge might be a box near an item in a customer's shopping
cart showing how many people are interested in that product, how
many also have that item in their cart, or how many of the items
are left.
Etsy is also testing whether customers are more likely to buy a
product if the reviews they see first are negative ones. In some
cases, buyers could interpret negative reviews as "honest
feedback," Mr. Fisher said.
Write to Sara Castellanos at sara.castellanos@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 19, 2020 15:53 ET (20:53 GMT)
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