Tech platform ViSenze processed 175 million visual searches this October, which is a 30% increase compared to last year
New Delhi: There has been an increase in the number of visual searches during online shopping according to Singapore-based, AI-powered visual search and recommendation platform, ViSenze.
ViSenze has processed over 175 million visual searches across its e-commerce customers during the recently concluded October festive season in India, which is a 30% increase as compared to last year, the company said in a press release.
A visual search is a technology that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to enable shoppers to search online using any type of image instead of text or keyword. Currently, four out of the top five e-commerce platforms in India use ViSenze for their visual search, the release added.
Visual search has become the go-to option for faster and more accurate product discovery because of the ease of use it offers. With visual search, shoppers aren’t slowed down by language or spelling issues.
Top Searches
The top searched categories using visual search were shoes, tops, dresses, ethnic wear, and jewellery reported ViSenze.
Categories like bags and watches have seen a big jump in the number of queries, compared to last year. Around 83% of the image searches are from screenshots, underlining the influence that social media has on the modern shopper, with the remaining searches initiated through the camera lens.
Other insights
Online shoppers also use image search to compare prices across platforms, as it’s the fastest way to shop for the best deal.
ViSenze’s data also shows that a large portion of the visual search queries are from tier 2 and tier 3 Indian cities indicating that a lot of new-to-ecommerce customers prefer visual search to the traditional keyword-based text search. This number is only going to grow as more consumers come online in the coming years.
“Indian internet users spend 44% of their time on social media, which is the highest in the world,” said Oliver Tan, chief executive officer, ViSenze.
“They also use 8.7 social platforms on average. This means that their shopping inspiration often happens on social media. This is one reason why visual search is so important in India,” added Tan.
According to Tan, the large increase in visual search during the big festive sale across the top e-commerce platforms is a sign of things to come which indicates that shoppers want a more intuitive search and deeply personalised shopping experiences.
ViSenze, which helps leading retailers like Myntra, Ajio, Meesho, Rakuten, Zalora, Mango, and Target further predicts the next possibility on the horizon which is multi-search, which will combine both visual and text inputs into one query to give even better results.
The company said that it processes over a billion queries a month globally from retailers, helping them increase conversions and amplify revenue growth.
