Key ecommerce players Amazon, China’s Alibaba, and eBay, among others, now provide visual search tools that allow users to submit images as queries instead of text. This technology is also filtering into social media properties like Snapchat, which now lets users take a picture of an item and buy it on Amazon or Pinterest.
In theory, visual search can make the digital path to purchase for consumers even more seamless than it already is. See something you want to buy out in the wild? Just take a picture and let a visual search engine guide you to a product page.
But are consumers ready to embrace the technology?
New research released by Bizrate suggests that consumers are still in the early stages of familiarizing themselves with visual search. The company’s survey of US internet users from December 2018 found that 48% of respondents had not yet used visual search, but were somewhat or very interested in it.