Store Of The Future, Today: Visual Search & Augmented Reality
Create A Highly Visual Shopping Experience For Customers
With Visual Search & Augmented Reality
Home Furnishings is a fashion-based and highly visual industry, so visual search and augmented reality are a natural fit. Retailers that have adopted visual search report a significant increase in conversion rates and average order value.
A study released by the National Research Group on the use of visual search found that seven in ten consumers who are aware of visual search technology are likely to try it and four in five visual search users have made purchase decisions or engaged with brands because of social media.
The study, "Visual Search: A Disruptor for Retail, Social and Beyond in 2020," stated that there is strong demand for more intuitive ways to find inspiration and information.
Visual search and AR technology have particularly promising applications for home décor and fashion retailers with major brands like Pinterest and Ebay launching visual search and AR try-on features over the last 2 years.
The new Lens app from Pinterest allows the user to point their phone camera at pretty much anything to bring up related content from the brand’s website.
Estée Lauder, Sephora, and other major beauty brands are utilizing Lens to offer their customers the ability to “try on” makeup looks.
Ebay launched a visual search tool for mobile where users upload any picture and Ebay finds items for sale with strong visual similarities.
Unlike traditional search methods, visual search enables consumers to use real-world images, from screenshots to photographs, to search online. Using artificial intelligence, visual search recognizes patterns in an image and matches them to patterns stored in the algorithm’s memory.
This technology can save consumers hours of searching for items or trying different search terms and scrolling through pages of results to find exactly what they’re looking for. It also enables customers to search for an entire ‘look’ or theme, embracing a key element of today’s consumer culture that text would struggle to capture.
Augmented Reality takes things a step further by allowing customers to try selected home goods in their personal space without making a purchase or dealing with returns.
How can home furnishings retailers implement this new technology?
In order to prepare for the implementation of a visual search engine or augmented reality, retailers should begin by creating or collecting dozens of high-quality images of their products.
Investing in high-quality images isn’t insanely expensive or complicated. Once that project is complete, retailers should mark those images up properly so that search engines can use them to serve results to shoppers. (Managing visual assets? You need PIM.)
Once you’ve collected high-res images of your products from multiple angles, vendors like Syte, Skafos, Vue, and Slyce offer AI visual search engines that integrate with your product catalog and ecommerce platform to serve shoppers personalized recommendations and accurate visual search results.