ViSenze, the artificial intelligence company that develops breakthrough visual technology for e-commerce and digital businesses, released data on the rising demand for visual search and discovery capabilities. In 2016, ViSenze processed over 350 million image queries on shopping platforms around the globe – a 250 percent increase over 2015. This means nearly one million queries a day were generated by shoppers on shopping platforms around the world.
In recent years, determining an ideal shopping experience has become the job of the consumer, versus that of the manufacturer or merchant. Today’s digital world is customer-centric and brands therefore must provide entertaining, inspiring, and – most importantly – efficient shopping experiences or risk losing their customers to competitors who are only a click away.
Using ViSenze’s visual commerce solutions, retailers saw an uplift of up to five times Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) from increased conversions.
Our data confirms the growing importance of artificial intelligence for ecommerce as today’s online shoppers, and in particular millennials, want to spend less time searching for the products they want to purchase,” said Oliver Tan, Co-Founder and CEO of ViSenze. “They are also highly visual and tend to be inspired by visual content that helps them discover ideas and information to make better buying decisions.”
ViSenze’s technology enables today’s shoppers to find the products they seek more quickly through visual search. This intuitive shopping experience reduces the time to discovery and increases product views and conversions. Retailers in fashion, shoes, accessories, jewelry, handbags, and more are clearly embracing the opportunity, with more than 300 million product images indexed by ViSenze in 2016.
Adoption is expected to accelerate in the coming years as consumer behavior continues to be driven by visual content. ViSenze’s web-scaled distributed architecture platform now supports over one billion images at uptimes in excess of 99 percent.
ViSenze was founded in 2012 by a team of computer vision scientists and web entrepreneurs. In September of 2016, ViSenze closed a Series B round, raising $10.5 million from Rakuten Ventures, SPH Media Fund, Enspire Capital and WI Harper Group. In order to support and accelerate this growth in 2017, ViSenze has opened offices and added key personnel in the United States, the United Kingdom, and China in recent months.
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