5 November 2020
Matas breaks the code for visual search within beauty
In cooperation with the e-commerce house Hesehus, Matas has once again proved to be one of the front-runners within e-commerce with the launch of visual search on matas.dk. A functionality which has not been seen till now in beauty webshops neither at home nor abroad.
Press release
Today, visual search within fashion is a known feature which acknowledged brands such as ASOS, Zara and H&M via their app offer to customers in the hunt for a certain outfit. However, within beauty the functionality has not yet gained acceptance neither in Denmark nor internationally since the prerequisite for a successful match is completely different. Denmark’s leading beauty giant, Matas, is now changing this with the launch of visual search on matas.dk. A functionality which has been developed in close cooperation with Matas’s regular e-commerce supplier, Hesehus.
Search with camera
With visual search, Matas is now making it possible for its customers to search and find a product merely by taking a picture or scanning a bar code. When the product is found, the customer has a choice between completing the purchase right away, save it as a favourite for a later purchase or merely checking out the price and be informed about whether the local Matas shop has it in stock. And Matas is not just offering the functionality in its app, which is the case for many fashion brands, but also on web.
One more step in the hunt for optimal omnichannel commerce
Visual search taps perfectly into Matas’s ambitious omnichannel strategy to give the customers the best coherent customer journey across channels online as well as in-store. In addition to the easier search for the customers, the functionality is brilliantly supporting the customers’ omnichannel journey. Having the mobile close at hand, the customers can take a single picture or scan the bar code and be able to easily reorder their favourite cream from the bathroom at home or check out the list of ingredients and product reviews for a specific product in the shop before making the actual purchase. In other words, visual search is yet another step for Matas to create the ultimate overall experience for its customers regardless of platform.
Brian Andersen, , e-commerce director at Matas
”To live up to our ambition to be Danish women's preferred digital destination, we are working with two primary focus areas which are to offer the best digital guidance and give our customers the ultimate user experience. With visual search we are removing part of the friction from the customers and making their navigation and finding a certain product as easy and simple as possible and with it improve the shopping experience even more for them online”
The text completes the perfect match
Where visual search differs significantly from the beauty segment is in the use of the picture search. Within fashion the consumers may have spotted a fabulous, red bikini or a dress in a beautiful print and by means of a picture and the visual search technology, it is easy for them to be presented with similar products in their favourite webshops. But the prerequisite within beauty is different. Here the consumer is less interested in the product’s physical appearance and packaging and more interested in the content and the exact product.
This was a challenge for Matas in connection with the many beauty brands which often create recognisability in their line of products by styling them and wrapping them in the same nice packaging even though the products contain something completely different. In Matas’s own striped line for foot care where in the pictures of Matas foot scrub, foot cream and foot salve, it is the text on the packaging which differentiates the products.
So far, this is exactly what has discouraged international development houses from taking up the gauntlet with visual search within beauty. Together with Matas, the e-commerce house, Hesehus, from Odense is now providing a solution for this with the development of a visual search functionality which also extracts the text and compares it with all products on matas.dk. In this way, it is possible for the functionality to distinguish between the basically identical appearances of the products and thereby present the customers with the right match. Like in other picture seaches, the accuracy of a correct match depends on the quality of the picture and sharpness, but if the customer is not presented with an identical match, Matas is ready with alternative matching suggestions in a prioritised sequence.
Mette Reinholt Mortensen, COO at Hesehus
”To us as a development house, it has been a very exciting innovation project where we in an intense and close course of development with Matas have created a functionality which makes it even easier for Matas to present their customers with a relevant product selection. A functionality which increases the user experience and thus the customer loyalty from the customers and this will hopefully also be reflected in Matas’s bottom line in the form of higher conversion and not least additional sales”
All smartphones and tablets with camera can be used for Matas visual search and all data are of course anonymised.
For comments, please contact Lars Hedal, CEO in Hesehus at +45 40 25 50 83 or hedal@hesehus.dk
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