New tool helps brands select crowd-sourced photos, increase conversions
Nearly 10,000 attendees visited the Internet Retail Conference & Exhibition, held in Chicago from June 10-13, 2014. The strong attendance numbers speak to the importance of the event for those in the eCommerce industry.
As has been the case over the past 10 years, IRCE 2014 served as a pedestal for leaders in online retailing to showcase their new products and expert services. With more than 600 exhibitors at the show, there were countless products to learn about. One, however, stood out from the crowd. Coincidently, the product focuses on crowd-sourced photography.
In a press release dated June 11, 2014, Olapic, a visual commerce platform for collecting, curating and showcasing customer photos on eCommerce websites, announced its new Photorank algorithm tool to help brands identify and display customer photos that have the most potential to drive conversions in an eCommerce environment.
The release of Olapic’s new tool is well timed, considering the growing number of online retailers that are considering crowdsourcing a cost-effective way to develop content and cultivate an interactive customer base. To illustrate the rising prevalence of crowd-sourced photography, Luis Sans, co-founder and CTO of Olapic, was quoted in the press release as saying, “With almost two billion photos being posted online daily, brands have an over-abundance of powerful and authentic visual user content.”
The challenge, however, is finding the in-house resources to gather and manage the incoming photos. Once submissions start arriving, a dedicated staff member will be responsible for labeling, categorizing and choosing photos to use.
For businesses that hope to offload some of the responsibilities that come with crowdsourcing, Olapic’s algorithm solves the hurdle of selecting which photos will be most effective in driving sales. It does so through the use of Olapic’s proprietary engine, which analyzes photos based on more than 45 visual and contextual factors, ranking them by their expected conversion power.
“This makes content curation significantly faster and more effective than random or manual selection,” the press released explained. In fact, “results show Photorank-selected photos perform seven times better than those selected randomly and between two and three times better than those selected based on basic features, such as color or captions.”
To help businesses decide whether crowdsourcing photos is an endeavor to take on, NetSphere Strategies posted a blog titled, “The pros and cons of crowdsourcing product photos.” To stay in tune to other new tools and innovations being released into the eCommerce industry, subscribe to the NetSphere Strategies blog.