Fashion App ASOS Adds Image Search Feature

Searching by images has become one of the more popular ways to find something online. Whether it’s finding new recipes or new hairstyle ideas, the internet is there to help consumers. One of the more popular image search options is in the fashion world.

With companies like Pinterest and Facebook, we’ve seen an uptick in visual images appearing online. As such, it should come as no surprise that fashion eCommerce app ASOS has joined others in adding an image search feature to its app. Given the fact that most people do not want to wade through enormous amounts of text, this move makes sense for the ASOS team.

Through an unnamed third party helping to deliver this new feature, it’s currently only available to those with Apple operating systems, but the company has confirmed it will be rolling this out to Android users soon. As it stands, a majority of the company’s U.K. traffic (80 percent) and orders (70 percent) come from mobile, with people spending an hour and a half on average each month. ASOS users will now be able to either use their own photos or an existing online image to enable the app to make recommendations of similar clothing styles from the company’s bank of 85,000 products.

ASOS’ head of product and UX, Richard Jones, commented to Forbes on the company’s decision to add on the image search feature. “The depth of our offering is absolutely one of our strengths. However that range can be challenging to present to customers, especially on a mobile phone. If you know what you want, you can quite simply get to what you’re looking for,” Jones said. “But what we’re trying to find is more of that discovery use case – if you’re not quite sure what you want, or you’ve seen something that’s inspired you, visual search is designed to kick start that discovery…. It’s about getting as close as possible to giving you something that is visually similar.”