Syte Develops a New Edge for Mobile Payments: Visual Search

With security concerns fading to a dull roar in the background as far as people’s use of the technology goes, a new concern is rising to take its place: use cases. Customers want to know where they can actually use the technology they’re coming to enjoy so, and examples are a little less than quickly forthcoming. Syte, meanwhile, recently dropped word our way about one such point that should light a fire under the use case concept: visual search.

Visual search, for those not familiar, is the practice of taking an image—a picture of an item, often a piece of clothing or the like—and running it through a search engine the way we do now with snippets of text, and sometimes, quotation marks and even Boolean operators. Syte has made major advances in this field, to the point where Samsung and Microsoft have run tests using the technology and found it 90 percent accurate. That’s a far cry from many of Syte’s competitors, who could only generate about 50 percent accuracy in similar tests.

So how does this work with mobile payments? Simple, as noted by Syte’s Lihi Pinto-Fryman; visual search cuts down the time from discovery to potential purchase. That helps put things that weren’t formerly impulse buys into the impulse buy category; that shirt you saw some actor wear on some TV show is now potentially available to you for a few clicks instead of running through the text-based gauntlet you would have had to run with a search engine.

Basically, it’s all about making the process of going from discovery to purchase as smooth, quick, and error-free as possible. When it’s that easy to spend money, customers will likely do so, all else being equal. The faster a customer can go from “That’s awesome!” to “I just ordered one!” the better for product makers. Tools like mobile payments and visual search help us get to that point faster, a dream come true for marketers.

The mobile payments landscape is a strange place. When you throw in a few new technologies, though, the end result is a better customer experience for all. Improving customer experience commonly means improving sales too, so some new mobile payments connections may ultimately come out of the growth of visual search.