Remember when you had to comb through pages of results to track down where to buy that coveted pair of Nikes In Egypt? Now all you need is a picture. The transition of words to visuals is nothing new, but now search engines and retail businesses are tapping into the power of visual search. Jennifer Lopez’s famous Versace dress — which she wore to the 2000 Grammys Award ceremony — launched the invention of Google Images that year. Since then AI has enabled us to ask Siri or Alexa what tomorrow’s weather will be or track down a killer tune played on TV using Shazam. But are retailers at a risk of falling behind if they don’t jump onto the image-dominant eCommerce future?

We’re visual creatures, and the data backs it up. Our minds can identify images in as little as 13 milliseconds and 90% of information transmitted to our brains is visual. A whopping 85% of consumers place more importance on visuals when shopping online, and 62% of millennials and Gen Z’ers want more visual search capabilities to quickly discover and track down products on their phones.

So while the concept of visual searching isn't new, recent developments have opened up new avenues that can benefit online sellers and boost sales. Google Lens and Multisearch allows users to snap a photo, find a look-a-like then refine searches by color, brand and other visual attributes with a few keywords. Snapchat's Scan helps identify anything from plants to shoes spotted on a walk in the neighborhood. Apple’s Visual Look Up, launched this year, identifies and provides information about anything from popular landmarks to famous art found inside your photos.

All these advances turn the world around us into a purchase-driven search engine, opening up more discoverability for retailers and the ability to tap into new customer bases. Retail giants like Amazon and ASOS have been using visual search for years to help shoppers discover new products and trends as well as sift through their massive inventory faster. Marketing experts say leveraging and optimizing the power of visual search is essential for online shopping because 47% of potential customers give up on a product search after a single attempt. Visual search engines rely heavily on pattern recognition, detailed text tags, and sufficient data for efficient matching to queries.

Ready to optimize your retail website? Obviously, the images are the heroes. To facilitate a high functioning visual search engine scan, retail websites should compile a large bank of images of their inventory and add it to their site map. Offer multiple photos of the same product from different angles. This ensures that customers will find it regardless of which angle they uploaded in visual search. Only use and upload clear, high-resolution images for more efficient matching with visual search engine crawlers. Finally, don’t ignore proper, short descriptive file names and alt tags. These are necessary to identify your inventory, because search engines scan for keywords in those as well as body text, meta description, and page titles. Last but not least, curate your online storefront to entice buyers. Some 90% of Pinterest users use the platform to make decisions about what to buy because it’s a visual platform. Create a content strategy for your social media presence that involves a consistent color and style aesthetic linked with product tagging for online purchases and alt text for search engine optimization.