The official rollout of these features comes about three months after eBay first announced its image search plans back in July, and has risen amid a bullish outlook for image search, as an estimated 50% of searches are expected to come from images or videos by 2020, and more than 75% of consumers already admit to being inspired to make a purchase based on images they viewed, according to GeoMarketing.
The idea for eBay’s features emerged during the annual eBay Hack Week company-wide innovation competition, though eBay is hardly the only company going live with image search capabilities these days. Retailers like Macy’s and Target were doing some form of image-driven search a few years ago, though in more recent times, Google and especially Pinterest have invested more in image search technology to refine these capabilities and make them easier to use.
