The Role of Computer Vision in e-commerce

E-commerce is competitive, and profitability is difficult. Amazon, probably the biggest e-commerce player in the world, made a profit for the first time in 2011, 14 years after its inception.

If you’re an e-commerce business, you need to stay on top of technology trends and leverage them to always have an edge over your competition. Inculcating Computer Vision solutions is a fantastic way to achieve that goal.

If you have any doubts about the impact of CV, in terms of market size/ reach, a study by Statista has found that the industry is poised to hit $25,570 mn by 2019, a growth of almost 180% since 2018.

Below are 4 solid ways in which Computer Vision can and is already changing the face of e-commerce:

Automatic Product Categorization

Object detection is one of the primary use cases of Computer Vision. It helps automate tedious tasks that do not need to be performed by a human but still were being done due to a lack of appropriate technology.

Earlier, products that were uploaded to an e-commerce website for sale, had to be manually classified into their specific categories. With the dawn of object detection capabilities, a computer can differentiate one item from another. Hence, products can be automatically classified into t-shirts, mugs, electronics, etc.

This can help e-commerce businesses to use their creative human workforce for much more innovative tasks.

Detecting fake brands

With the help of Computer Vision, a machine can easily identify brand logos present in an image and find out the name of the company it represents. This makes it much easier for e-commerce business like Amazon to know when a seller is uploading his products under a different and fake brand name. This helps to establish trust and increases credibility with the end-users.

Detecting inappropriate content

Manually combing through product images uploaded by multiple sellers on your e-commerce platform, to weed out permissible and non-permissible images is not humanly possible.

But it is achievable with the help of Computer Vision, which is why you can automatically eliminate any explicit content, i.e carry out a safety search on every image that is uploaded.

Any depiction of adultery, violence, racial discrimination or spoofs can be instantly detected, and that image can be rejected from being uploaded.

Make personalized product recommendations

When a potential customer visits your website, they are likely to check out a product or two, and these products will have some images uploaded. Using Computer Vision capabilities, we can run a scan on these images and identify the kind of product the customer is looking for. Once we have this information, similar products can be recommended to each customer, all reliant on their browsing history, hence leading to personalized product recommendations.

Homes.com already uses this technology to help people find their dream home. All people have to do is snap a picture of the house they admire, choose their desired location, and the app lists similar-looking homes in that location.

E-commerce platforms can take this personalization to another level. The cosmetics section can allow users to upload pictures of a makeup look that they want to achieve, and then recommend the specific products that will help users to achieve that look.

Computer vision capabilities like image analytics, logo detection, and object detection can transform your e-commerce business and help boost sales. If you’re ready to leverage this emerging technology, talk to us today.