As artificial intelligence sees increasing adoption by e-commerce companies , start-ups like SnapShopr, Staqu Technologies, Wazzat Labs, MadStreetDen and iLenze are experimenting with deep learning and image search technologies focused on powering fashion e-tailers to simplify catalogue search, drive customer engagement and get higher conversions.

Ankit Sachan is co-founder of iLenze, which raised $500,000 from Singapore based Mercatus Capital. He explained that there were two big trends that prompted his start-up:

“Firstly, increasing number of smartphones has eased access to smart cameras, which has triggered increased image-based content on the internet. “Secondly, we realized that businesses would increasingly need deep learning technologies to understand and analyse visual content to gain valuable insights – which can be the difference between success and failure now.”

iLenze’s flagship product Visual Search lets customers in their moment of inspiration – say seeing a film star wearing a particular dress click pics with their phone camera and search catalogues of e-tailers for matches of the product.

The technology is inbuilt within the e-tailer’s application and helps connect product discovery in the offline world like reading a magazine or on the street to online searches of similar products on e-commerce websites. By making it easier and more efficient for consumers to scan the e-tailer’s catalogue, the tech increases engagement and thus higher conversion rates and transactions.


AI In Vogue

Fashion e-commerce players now believe AI will give them a competitive edge above increasing automation and reducing costs.

“If you look at fashion, personalized search is more through visuals than physical data like it is for electronic products. It is extremely critical for marketplaces like us to automate visual search through deep-learning technologies and we need to generate metadata automatically. It helps predict trends to stock up for particular occasions and also to eliminate duplicate products sold by multiple sellers on the platform in a customer’s search,” said Sujayath Ali, CEO at Voonik, which has an in-house team of five working on image learning.

It has also outsourced visual recommendation to Chennai startup MadStreetDen.

Delhi-based Staqu Tecnologies which recently raised funding from Indian Angel Network works with six to seven fashion companies like Roposo, PayTM , Abof and YepMe. The company is also running pilots with Reliance Industries’ recently launched fashion e-commerce site for automating visual recommendation and meta tagging.

Barely a year old, Staqu is focused on increasing automation in e-commerce companies with its services such as image search, tag generation and real-time recommendation. For e-commerce companies scurrying to reduce costs, automation is the only way out.

 “Manual product tagging that aids search is a costly affair and can be done to the scale of around 700 products a day, whereas the same can be done by artificial intelligence technologies in seconds. The same applies to product recommendation for which leading e-commerce companies employ human curators. AI can replace manual processes to reduce costs drastically while increasing scale at the same time,” said Atul Rai, CEO at Staqu, which is currently investing towards increasing computational strength of its AI engine and in research for further product improvement and accuracy levels”.

These start-ups are also experimenting with other industries wherein AI can see fast adoption to aid e-commerce.

Staqu for instance is also running pilots with mobile phone companies such as Carbon, Lava and Panasonic to instill ‘buy mode’ within the phone cameras -using the feature customers can click pics and instantly search for the product across dozens of e-commerce sites.
“E-commerce is the low hanging fruit for AI and the biggest advantage is e-commerce being a young industry, adoption could be much faster. But the scope is much higher across multiple other industries, fintech could be the next big play for these startups,” said Bikky Khosla, CEO, Trade India who led the investment in Staqu from IAN.