Consumers Raise Their Expectations for Visual Search

Slyce is a leading visual search provider. eMarketer's Yory Wurmser recently spoke with Slyce CEO Ted Mann about visual search's evolution over the past year and how consumers have changed their expectations. This interview was conducted as part of the eMarketer report: "Visual Search 2018: New Tools from Pinterest, eBay, Google and Amazon Increase Accuracy, Utility."

eMarketer:

The fashion, furniture and home improvement industries were early adopters of visual search. Which other sectors are using it?

Ted Mann:

Grocery seems to be heating up the most right now. The big use case in grocery is list-building—using visual search to be able to develop a shopping list or do self-checkout in store. Consumers aren’t just taking an image of a physical product, they’re also scanning barcodes, free-standing inserts and catalogs. You can go into a camera mode and very quickly add things to a shopping list, and then bring that list into the store to pick up your order.

eMarketer:

Have your clients noticed a decrease in their text or voice searches as a result of visual search?

Ted Mann:

The reality is that visual search isn't taking away from text or voice—it's just adding to the overall search. People are searching with a new mode.

eMarketer:

Do most people who try visual search come back and try it again?

Ted Mann:

We see extremely high retention rates with Slyce. I don't know if that's the case for other visual search providers. But we've seen with our regulars an 18% average growth rate month over month. We've seen that for three years straight, so it has proven to be quite sticky. The only exceptions were when we delivered solutions where the accuracy wasn't as good. We saw a pretty steep drop-off when the accuracy level wasn't at our standard threshold, which is 90%.

Interview conducted on August 23, 2018

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