eBay adopts Google’s AMP to speed up its mobile site

Ecommerce company eBay today announced that it has started using the Google-led open source Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology for more quickly displaying webpages on end users’ mobile devices. Altogether, around 8 million AMP pages are now live.

The new AMP-powered product category pages look cleaner than the non-AMP pages. But perhaps more importantly, they show up faster. And eBay will be bringing the new style to desktop and its native apps, eBay principal web engineer Senthil Padmanabhan wrote in a blog post.

But that’s not all.

“We have been thinking about leveraging the AMP ecosystem for our own search, similar to how Google handles AMP results,” Padmanabhan wrote. “This plan is in very early stages of discussion, but the possibility of our search using AMP technology is very interesting.”

Pinterest, which is increasingly focused on ecommerce, has experimented with AMP pages in its app. But the technology has more commonly been implemented to serve up news articles. (You can say the same thing about Facebook’s proprietary Instant Articles technology.) Google News, Google search, the Google app, and the Google Play Newsstand app all rely on AMP now.

Google is now working with eBay on things like A/B testing and smart buttons.

“With items like these in place, AMP for eCommerce will soon start surfacing,” Padmanabhan wrote.