eBay launches visual search tools for finding products using photos from your phone or web
With more than one billion active listings on eBay at any given time, it constantly finds opportunity to showers it’s users with new features every now and then, this time eBay has come up with a pretty impressive feature that uses deep learning and computer vision in order to let shoppers use a photograph to find products for sale on the site.
This feature lets the company compete better with Amazon, Pinterest or Google who already have this feature as a means of connecting the buyers with the product of their interest.
eBay has embedded machine learning and artificial intelligence in its site, the same technology is used to put image search feature in effect, this will result in better search as the users can either upload the image or take a photograph of the image he is using for search.
There are two parts of eBay’s implementation of visual search:
- Image Search
- Find It on eBay
With the help of image search the users of this website can take a photograph or upload a photo in order to search the listing similar to the photograph, the second part of feature lets the users share images they find on the web including social media, and then “share” that image into eBay to search related listings.
eBay believes that because of the size of its catalog and being a long established company can give an advantage to them in this space, there is a lot of data they have accumulated through the years.
Visual search functionality is not fairly new to the market; it is usually used for eCommerce sites and stock photo portals that are dominated by large amounts of image content. Incorporating image recognition automates visual search functionality, as well as creates a more engaging search experience.
Online visual search makes it easy for users to search for similar images, which not only helps them easily find what they are looking for but also creates a better and broader browsing experience thus exposing the user to more products and increasing the sale as well as the time spent on the site.
