Retail therapy to soon become visually appealing

Now buying your favorite designs online is going to be easier than ever. With the Computer Vision feature, you’ll get more apt search results while shopping online. As per a report appeared in The Economic Times, India’s growing ecommerce sites Craftsvilla and Voonik are looking forward to a feature in which image search would be used instead of textual inputs provided by the user.

Craftsvilla co-founder and CEO Manoj Gupta said, "If the customer likes a color or pattern, they'd want to be shown a similar kind of product and this feature is incredibly useful."

India’s leading ecommerce sites including Flipkart and YepMe had already been using the feature. While Flipkart introduced this last week to its consumers, YepMe had launched it even earlier.

Computer vision, the newest technology in the Indian eCommerce space, is a growing discipline of computer science where computers are enabled with massive computing power to recognise images. Tech giants Google, Facebook and Microsoft have invested heavily in this technology.

Sujayath Ali, co-founder and CEO of a Chennai-based fashion retailer Voonik, says, "That might work for other categories like electronics or books. But for fashion, visual search provides a clear advantage."

The firm offers image search to many of its users. "We decided not to look at aggregate data and decided to get more personal with the user right from the first," said Ali, a former Amazon executive.

While Voonik gets close to 2 million unique visitors per month, Craftsvilla gets close to six lakh visits a month through its website and mobile application, using the image recognition technology supplied by Chennai-based computer vision startup Mad Stree Den.