Adding visual search to your e-commerce shop
According to Forbes, there has been a 55% increase in America's e-commerce spending since the pandemic outbreak (COVID 19), which has had a significant impact on consumer spending not just online, but in general.
People have found a way to sell just about anything online and e-commerce platforms exist for just about any kind of product. And depending on the kind of product you want to sell online, some platform choices may be more ideal than others.
There are different things to put into consideration when choosing an e-commerce platform. Some examples are:
- Ease of use and administration
- Reliability
- Security
- Features and roadmap
Businesses are seeking to sell goods and services online due to the growing popularity of the e-commerce market. Getting an online business up and running used to be challenging. In order to manage inventories, manage transactions, and protect customer information, it was necessary to have technical expertise, these daunting tasks have been made easy with the help of e-commerce site builders and the trove of plugins and integrations they inspire. For you to manage inventories or your transactions, you can simply integrate an existing service that offers this functionality to your e-commerce store.
For an e-commerce website, plugins are essential since these tools improve features and functionalities. A wide range of functionalities and features can be added to your store with these e-commerce plugins. Site builders can help you get online quickly, however, just having an online presence won't earn you rewards. In order to attain high revenues, you need traffic, customers, and sales. The primary objective of adding any extension or plugins to your store should be to make things easier for you or your customers. That way your customers can do more buying, and you can do more to meet the increasing demands.
Why visual search?
Visual search is simply searching with an image representation of what you are looking for.
The visual search typically starts with a person pointing their mobile phone’s camera at a specific object in the real world or uploading an image from their gallery, which the search engine then uses image recognition technology to identify objects within the image and brings up relevant results.
Benefits of visual search
- In a scenario where the user does not know how to describe the item she is looking for but has a visual reference, visual search opens new possibilities.
- Improving product discovery: as your inventory size grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to organise products in a way that is helpful to every customer. That's why search bars are effective and whereas text search bars are generally valuable, for fashion items, image search is more relevant.
- Visual content explosion: there's a rapid and continuing growth in the adoption of visual media content format on the internet. Giving users the possibility of searching with visual input will give you a strategic advantage over the competition.
How to integrate visual search into your e-commerce shop.
Custom e-commerce website
- Building completely scratch
- Building with open-source e-commerce packages/frameworks
Do you plan on using headless e-commerce platforms such as vendure, Saleor, Next JS commerce, and others, to develop custom e-commerce websites? You can leverage Lykdat search API to provide a visual search solution to your customers.
We’ll be taking you deep-diving into the countless opportunities the API offers and how to incorporate it into your unique e-commerce store in our upcoming post. Here is an example of an online store created using the NextJSCommerce platform and fully connected with the Lykdat search API. Look for new entries and articles on our blog as you explore the countless opportunities Lykdat offers you.
Conclusion
In recent years, it has become increasingly important to ensure that customer experience is frictionless. Alternatives are abundant and competition is intense. For an e-commerce site, the most important aspect of the user's interaction is checkout. Checking out is however only possible if the users are first able to find what they're looking for. It is therefore important for every e-commerce store to double down on their customer experience right from the search and discovery stage, up until the user has to checkout.