Tag: ecommerce content optimization

  • How AI-Powered Visual Highlighting Helps Brands Achieve Product Consistency Across eCommerce

    How AI-Powered Visual Highlighting Helps Brands Achieve Product Consistency Across eCommerce

    As eCommerce increasingly becomes a prolific channel of sales for consumer brands, they find that maintaining a consistent and trustworthy brand image is a constant struggle. In an ecosystem filled with dozens of marketplaces and hundreds of third-party merchants, ensuring that customers see what aligns with a brand’s intended image is quite tricky. With many fakes and counterfeit products doing the rounds, brands may further struggle to get the right representation.

    One way brands can track and identify inconsistencies in their brand representation across marketplaces is to use Digital Shelf Analytics solutions like DataWeave’s – specifically the Content Audit module.

    This solution uses advanced AI models to identify image similarities and dissimilarities compared with the original brand image. Brands could then use their PIM platform or work with the retailer to replace inaccurate images.

    But here’s the catch – AI can’t always accurately predict all the differences. Relying solely on scores given by these models poses a challenge in tracking the subtle differences between images. Often, image pairs with seemingly high match scores fail to catch important distinctions. Fake or counterfeit products and variations that slip past the AI’s scrutiny can lead to significant inaccuracies. Ultimately, it puts the reliability of the insights that brands depend on for crucial decisions at risk, impacting both top and bottom lines.

    Dealing with this challenge means finding a balance between the number-based assessments of AI models and the human touch needed for accurate decision-making. However, giving auditors the ability to pinpoint variations precisely goes beyond simply sharing numerical values of the match scores with them. Visualizing model-generated scores is important as it provides human auditors with a tangible and intuitive understanding of the differences between two images. While numerical scores are comparable in the relative sense, they lack specificity. Visual interpretation empowers auditors to identify precisely where variations occur, aiding in efficient decision-making.

    How AI-Powered Image Scoring Works

    At DataWeave, our approach involves employing sophisticated computer vision models to conduct extensive image comparisons. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models such as Resnet-50 or YOLO, in conjunction with feature extraction models, analyze images quantitatively. This AI-powered image scoring process yields scores that indicate the level of similarity between images.

    However, interpreting these scores and understanding the specific areas of difference can be challenging for human auditors. While computer vision models excel at processing vast amounts of data quickly, translating their output into actionable insights can be a stumbling block. A numerical score may not immediately convey the nature or extent of the differences between images

    In the assessment of these images, all fall within the 70 to 80 range of scores (out of a maximum of 100). However, discerning the nature of differences—whether they are apparent or subtle—poses a challenge for the AI models and human auditors. For example, there are differences in the placement or type of images in the packaging, as well as packing text that are often in an extremely small font size. It is, of course, possible for human auditors to identify the differences in these images, but it’s a slow, error-prone, and tiring process, especially when auditors often have to check hundreds of image pairs each day.

    So how do we ensure that we identify differences in images accurately? The answer lies in the process of visual highlighting.

    How Visual Highlighting Works

    Visual highlighting is a method that enhances our ability to comprehend differences in images by combining sophisticated algorithms with human understanding. Instead of relying solely on numerical scores, this approach introduces a visual layer, resembling a heatmap, guiding human auditors to specific areas where discrepancies are present.

    Consider the scenario depicted in the images above: a computer vision model assigns a score of 70-85 for these images. While this score suggests relatively high similarity, it fails to uncover major differences between the images. Visual highlighting comes into play to overcome this limitation, precisely indicating regions where even subtle differences are seen.

    Visual highlighting entails overlaying compared images and emphasizing areas of difference, achieved through techniques like color coding, outlining, or shading specific regions. The significance of the difference in a particular area determines the intensity of the visual highlight.

    For instance, if there’s a change in the product’s color or a discrepancy in the packaging, these variations will be visually emphasized. This not only streamlines the auditing process but also enables human evaluators to make well-informed decisions quickly.

    Benefits of Visual Highlighting

    • Intuitive Understanding: Visual highlighting offers an intuitive method for interpreting and acting upon the outcomes of computer vision models. Instead of delving into numerical scores, auditors can concentrate on the highlighted areas, enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of the decision-making process.
    • Accelerated Auditing: By bringing attention to specific regions of concern, visual highlighting speeds up the auditing process. Human evaluators can swiftly identify and address discrepancies without the need for exhaustive image analysis.
    • Seamless Communication: Visual highlighting promotes clearer communication between automated systems and human auditors. Serving as a visual guide, it enhances collaboration, ensuring that the subtleties captured by computer vision models are effectively conveyed.

    The Way Forward

    As technology continues to evolve, the integration of visual highlighting methodologies is likely to become more sophisticated. Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms may play an even more prominent role in not only detecting differences but also in refining the visual highlighting process.

    The collaboration between human auditors and AI ensures a comprehensive approach to maintaining brand integrity in the ever-expanding digital marketplace. By visually highlighting differences in images, brands can safeguard their visual identity, foster consumer trust, and deliver a consistent and reliable online shopping experience. In the intricate dance between technology and human intuition, visual highlighting emerges as a powerful tool, paving the way for brands to uphold their image with precision and efficiency.

    To learn more, reach out to us today!


    (This article was co-authored by Apurva Naik)

  • Top 4 ways to optimize content to drive e-commerce sales

    Top 4 ways to optimize content to drive e-commerce sales

    Content is the reigning king for e-commerce & plays a big role in driving sales and conversions. And, consumer-centric content that drives traffic is vital for e-commerce sales. Unlike offline retail where the sales staff on the ground is always available to answer customer queries, online that is not the case. When shopping online, customers rely on audio & visual product content to give them the information they need in order to make purchase decisions. Understanding that your product speaks to your customers directly on online channels is critical – so optimizing your product content to represent your brand in the best light is very important.

    Here are the Top 4 ways to optimize content & drive ROI.

    1. Focus on your customer & set a brand tone

    Who is your customer? And what type of product is your brand selling? The golden rule to getting the right content for your brand is to answer these two questions right. For instance, if you’re selling furniture and focusing on a family audience then using flowery language will not help your cause. You need to share factual, product-specific content, calling out furniture specs from color, fabric, size, and so on.

    Flower Glossary Categories

    Take for instance ProFlowers – a US-based flower retailer who created an entire Florapedia® – an in-depth flower guide. This content helped their customers learn more about the various flowers & discover new flowers they never knew of when making purchase decisions. To drive e-commerce sales, ProFlowers set the brand tone using educational content.
    On the other hand, if you are selling clothing or lingerie, you need to be extremely specific about the details of each product. Let’s look at reputed outdoor clothing brand Jack Wolfskin – they use high-quality images for content optimization and showcase real instances and moods in which the clothing can be worn or what they can be paired with. This is a good way to allow customers to picture themselves owning the item, as well as research their unique qualities.

    Clothing brand Jack Wolfskin
    Educational, visual-heavy, or fun & quirky – pick your content style based on your brand tone.

    2. Use videos as a powerful content optimization tool

    Videos empower content and hook your customers in. In a report, Cisco had earlier projected that by the year 2022, videos will be responsible for 82% of all consumer internet traffic. For e-commerce, video content can not only deliver a message but is easily shareable across all platforms. Videos not only possess the power to captivate people for extended amounts of time, but according to research, if a video is embedded on your website, you’re 53 times more likely to rank on the first page of Google. 

    Videos work as a descriptive medium to give more details about your product. Further, explanatory videos relieve consumer fears regarding the quality of the product by allowing viewers to visually experience its usages and benefits. MAC for instance uses a host of make-up tutorials and other video content on their website.

    videos as a powerful content optimization tool

    Videos bring brand storytelling to life and keep visitors informed. In the case of the videos created by MAC, they are not only informative and engaging, but they also help the brand answer common shopper questions with live examples. Customers who land upon the MAC website can watch videos relevant to the products they want to shop for, understand the product details and then decide if the product is for them. Thus, brands using videos can create a better customer experience by giving the visitors an immersive brand exposure online, just like they could have got offline. 

    3. Focus on making your product page consumer-centric

    A product page can be highly discoverable if it aligns with the best practices & standard e-commerce algorithms put in place by popular marketplaces and e-commerce channels. This is because the organic product ranking algorithms vary across channels and are composed of direct and indirect factors used to match a consumer’s popular search queries to products they are most likely to purchase. For better content optimization that ensures visibility, start by mapping platform-specific content standards. Then follow the SEO trends and tweak your product titles and description, to give your brand content a boost.

    LOVE Hair product
    Love Hair Product

    Take for instance the LOVE Hair product pages – the product titles are crafted using product features and benefits like revitalizing, nourishing, volumizing. Consumers searching for shampoos normally type in these attributes to look for shampoos that may suit their requirements – so using attributes as a hook in the product title is a great idea to make the product more discoverable against that keyword or attribute. 

    Next, keeping these standards as a backbone, fine-tune the product details you are putting out on the page. Your product features are the reasons why your consumer will buy your brand as compared to your competitors, so your descriptions should be crisp, easy to read, highlighting all the product features & facts that help them make that purchase decision. Let’s look at the Fitbit product page…

    Fitbit product page
    Fitbit Product Page

    4. Optimize content based on devices

    With mobile commerce reaching the tipping point in the e-commerce sales funnel, you cannot ignore attending to content optimization for hand-held devices. Many times, buyers on the go use mobile devices to conduct their research and your success lies in being able to entice them with a perfectly optimized e-commerce page even on their mobile device. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

    • Keep their reading experience in mind. Use shorter titles, and bite-sized product information so key points are upfront and visible on a tinier screen 
    • Be concise with your content presentation
    • Video content should not autoplay on mobile. The less invasive your content, the better
    • Keep video & image file sizes small so that page load time is quick
    Optimize content based on devices
    E-Commerce Product Page

    A perfectly balanced e-commerce product page is even more vital in the new normal, given that COVID has accelerated e-commerce, globally. So, whether you are selling furniture, books, clothes, or health juices, with the right focus on product content, you can convert shoppers into customers more easily and increase your sales & revenue. Feel free to take inspiration from some of the examples above to apply some of these strategies to your online store.

    And if you need to get your brand discovered with content optimization, here’s how DataWeave can help! 

    Building the right product page with the right content is not enough. You will also need to keep rehashing your product pages with reviews, offers, and other such relevant nodes to deliver the right punch. After all, delivering the right customer experience starts with a product page done right. 

    Want to see first-hand how DataWeave can help brands with content optimization? Sign up for a demo with our Digital Shelf experts to know more.