Revolutions in visual search aiding online sellers & buyers

Online shopping has brought with it the need for visual recommendations. When buying apparel or shoes online, it is not enough that a shopper gets recommendations based on their most-searched items. A shopper should be able to search for things using their images as well.

Start-ups in the visual search field

Many companies are identifying the importance of enabling a customer to search for apparel via images. With this end in mind, several start-ups are providing their services to leading online stores. Stylumia Intelligence, SnapShopr, Visenze, and iLenze are some of the start-ups that provide visual search platforms.

Some companies like Stylumia have thought of innovations in the search field. Stylumia, started by Ram Prakash and Ganesh Subramaniam, is the first program that allows input in Indian languages. It also takes images from different sources to gauge the fashion trends.

Ram Prakash explains, “We are developing a technology which takes natural images, videos, be it Bollywood videos or TV serials, whatever influences fashion, and decipher and extract fashion elements from that.”

Prakash maintains that the current trends in visual search are unable to analyse intelligence form the visual search results, and the analysis is only on a superficial level.

“They do not have a way to see all the relevant data together. That’s another problem that we are trying to solve,” said Prakash.

Launching in April

Stylumia is going to officially take off in the first week of April. It has already signed up leading retailers.

Ganesh Subramaniam remarked, “There’s a lot of interest among both online and offline retailers in this space. Our aim is to provide the most accurate prediction of demand and our consistency will improve as we work with more retailers and brands and get more and more data.”

It is becoming evident that the conventional recommendations and search modes are insufficient. Indian online sellers can do well to introduce visual search to help their shoppers search more accurately for that elusive garment.