Ecommerce sites can’t read an image like human eyes do. SnapShopr wants to change that.

After a long day’s work, one evening, Navneet Sharma took an auto-rickshaw home. On the way, he saw a beautiful dress on a mannequin outside an expensive store. He couldn’t help but imagine how good that dress would look on his girlfriend. So he clicked a picture of the dress using his smartphone as the auto-rickshaw grunted through the buzzling streets of Bangalore. He went home hoping that he would find a similar dress online. He searched in vain. It was tough to verbally describe what he was looking for.

This experience spurred Sharma to join hands with his friend, Debashish Pattnaik, to co-found Aincubate Innovations in Bangalore last June. The two friends wanted to develop a product that would enable visual search for fashion apparel and accessories.

In September last year, the startup launched SnapShopr as a consumer app. Sharma and Pattnaik wanted to find out the relevance of visual search in India. “After a few months of testing, we realized that it is better to move on to being a platform that enables visual search instead of staying a consumer app,” Sharma tells Tech in Asia.

After five months of testing, SnapShopr shed its consumer tech garb and became a platform offering a suite of tech tools for ecommerce players.

“Initially, we only had visual search for fashion apparel. Now we have ventured into fashion accessories and home decor too,” says Sharma.

Click a snap to shop

I tried out SnapShopr’s demo app available on Google Play. I clicked a picture of a design I liked and searched for dresses and tops with similar colors and patterns. The app threw up a bunch of them with similar visual texture. Then it took me to the ecommerce sites which had those products to complete the purchase.

The business-to-business side of SnapShopr’s tech stack, which is their main focus, allows visual search on partner ecommerce websites and apps for fashion apparel, fashion accessories and home decor.

Initially, the startup found it difficult to explain the usefulness of its technology to potential clients. There were no reference points to make them understand how this technology could help their businesses. “For retail technology companies with offline retailers on board, it was an even bigger challenge to convey the purpose of the platform,” adds Sharma

However, things improved for SnapShopr after Flipkart announced its plans to introduce visual search on its mobile app. Flipkart is working with Singapore-based ViSenze for this.

“This made our lives much easier because of two reasons; firstly, we had a big brand using the same technology as our API and secondly, we are confident that our technology is far better than Flipkart’s,” says Sharma. Sharma now had a reference to pitch SnapShopr to businesses. “We now say, ‘this is what Flipkart is doing, just that we are doing it better’,” he adds.

Once users take a picture on Flipkart, they have to select the category of the product they are looking for. Sharma deems this tedious and claims that SnapShopr instantly recognizes the information and knows whether it is a dress, a piece of jewelry, or furniture. “Our aim is to create something that would understand an image like a human being would,” he says.

One among the few