Online shopping is hard. We’ve all been in those situations where we know exactly what we want, but we can’t seem to find it online. Even when we have a picture of a similar item, it never seems to be quite right. It’s frustrating – and we get it.

Introducing Multimodal Search

We're committed to creating the best e-commerce search experience for users. In line with that ethos, we’re excited to officially launch an industry first—a multimodal function for e-commerce search. Users will be able to take advantage of this tool inside the Deft search bar, combining both natural language and images in their searches to find the perfect product.

For example, let’s say a user has pets and they’re looking for a sectional they saw in an Instagram video. They want it to be made of stain- and scratch-resistant materials, and they want it to be within a certain budget. On Deft, they can do those types of searches seamlessly across thousands of shops, like what you see below:

Why it’s better than what’s on the market:

• Big search engines are able to do decent text and image searching independent of each other. But in practice, the platform doesn’t seamlessly combine the two. Even adding an image with basic descriptors like price, brand, or color is unreliable. Deft was built so users can input exactly what they’re looking for and find it.
  
  

• Higher accuracy. If you try to do that same search, like the one we mentioned above on Google or Amazon (even without the images), they are generally going to give you ads or irrelevant products, such as the images below. Neither are sectionals, but merchants buy the term “pet-friendly” or jampack the keywords into their product titles to appear at the top of these searches. If you prompted Deft’s platform with the same query, you will actually be served only pet-friendly sectionals, from all over the web, taking into account materials, reviews, photos and more.
  
  

What's next

In the initial testing phase, 33% of our users have leverage the multimodal search capability, and we only see this number growing! As our monthly active users grow, more and more shoppers are able to more accurately search for what they are looking for using both test and images.

Consumers should spend time enjoying their furniture, not stuck in a research loop, settling on the next best thing.

We’re excited for more users to try our multimodal feature at shopdeft.com and start relaxing. Let us know what you think!