The new age of shopping

Are you still looking at the printed IKEA catalog before driving down to the store to get your new bedside table? I’ve got news for you: shopping has evolved. Again.

Are you still looking at the printed IKEA catalog before driving down to the store to get your new bedside table? I've got news for you: shopping has evolved. Again.

How the times change

Gone are the days when you actually needed to actively look for a product you wanted to but. Now you can just sit back, relax, and tap that buy button.

Bots, ads and visual search

So here’s the recap: There are currently 3 main methods in which shopping is evolving.

Visual Search

Nothing new, you upload a photo and a computer program analyses it and recognises the elements on it, telling you exactly what’s on there, just like Microsoft’s CaptionBot.

A Social Media platform which was the first to become a Social Commerce platform is Pinterest, with it’s ingenious Flashlight feature.

Pinterest’s Flashlight visual search featurePinterest’s Flashlight visual search feature

The Flashlight is basically a way of telling Pinterest which object on the image you’re interested in, and it will recognise and find other pins featuring only that object, where smart marketers will create exclusive buyable pins for that product.

Author: Shay Stibelman

Digital marketing consultant in Milan, Italy. Born in Israel, raised in Germany by Russian parents. I help small and medium businesses get their digital marketing game on point. Perfect their website, landing pages, funnel marketing and social media strategies, in order to increase ROI and optimize that ever elusive marketing budget.

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