The Rising Popularity of Visual Search in 2021 [Infographic]

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Stacey Rudolph Last updated: January 15, 2021

Visual search has improved a great deal over the past few years and is continuing to surge in 2021. According to Invespcro, more than 36% of online shoppers say they have used visual search and more than half of them claim visual information is more useful to them than text information. In 2021, we are more than likely to see both big and small companies improve their visual search capabilities in order to take advantage of this trend. Big companies like Amazon and Pinterest have already seen a surge in visual search popularity in the past year. For instance, Pinterest reported that they recorded over 600 million monthly visual searches in 2018. This is huge.

According to Gartner, those who will adopt quickly in 2021 and redesign their websites to support visual search will see their digital revenue increase by 30%. Doesn’t this sound appealing. Certainly, anything that will increase your revenue by a whopping 30% is certainly welcome. Data also shows that 62% of millennial prefer visual search tools to any other search technology. With these imposing statistics, it is important to start to seriously consider employing visual technology in your ecommerce site. It is also imperative to note that 74% of online shoppers think that traditional text based search is ineffective when it comes to finding the right product. As a result, nearly three quarters of internet searches in the United States are as a result of visual search.

If you are selling the following products/services:

Clothing
Furniture
Cars
Groceries
Vacations
Household items
Electronics
Wines and spirits

Then visual search technology is a priority in 2021. However, this doesn’t limit visual to the above categories of products/services.

The challenges of Visual Search

Although visual search technology is appealing, it has its own bottlenecks which you have to understand before employing visual search technology. Certainly, visual search is much more complex than traditional text search because the image itself becomes the query. Search engines have been doing tremendous work in trying to understand the components of images. However, sometimes the search results may return irrelevant images. Moreover, visual search technology hasn’t been monetized yet and it is not yet clear how companies will compete with other products relying on text search.

The opportunities

Despite the above obvious challenges, visual search will be embraced by brands in 2021. If you want to increase your revenue and remain competitive, investing in visual search will be prudent. Since 55% of online shopper say visual images contribute to their buying decisions, ecommerce with visual search features are definitely going to benefit.