ML/AI Color tagging drives sales boost

Overview

Decorators Best was losing sales due to color tagging issues.

DecoratorsBest is a leading supplier of Wallpaper and Fabrics. Customers shop at DecoratorsBest to meet their interior decorating needs.

  • Shopify Plus merchant
  • High level of sales
  • 75,000 SKUs
  • Color and pattern are key distinguishing product features

Visual merchandising is important for DecoratorsBest.
A key buying decision criteria is how the product looks
(as with most merchants).

Importance of Color

Color palette is a crucial element in product discovery and customer buying decisions for Decorators Best. Color product tags are integral in this process. They power key product discovery tools, product recommendations, product search and product filtering.

Problem

Almost 1 in 5 Decorator Best products did not have a color tag. Many color tags were either wrong or had color inconsistently applied. Product discovery and sales were being badly impacted.

Background

Historically, Decorators Best had color tagged products using:

• suppliers product color info
• inhouse color tagging
• outsourced color tagging

This led to 4 main problems:

1. Inconsistent color tags as different people had different color perceptions
2. Incorrect color tags as people make errors
3. Products went untagged. There are always so many things to do. At times other higher priority projects were progressed instead of product tagging. Approximately 18% of products had no color tag.
4. Considerable effort and cost was required by Decorators Best to color tag each product or push supplied color tags into its database

Results

• The “similar” product recommendations achieved excellent recommendation relevance and quality, meeting tight color, pattern and price band specifications
• Substantial increase in revenue
• “Recommendations that we would be proud to recommend” Barbara Karpf, President

These 4 issues led to performance issues in each of the product search, product filtering and product recommendation areas. Ultimately, costing sales.

What Frankie did

The Frankie team, experienced in VisualAI™, were asked to develop a color tagging solution. They had to overcome a number of challenges to accurately and consistently identify and extract product colors, including:

• Dealing with the difference between actual color and how the human eye perceives color
• Coping with differences in light illumination both within and between images which often creates changes in perceived color
• Differing shading and camera angles that can lead to color appearing different in different parts of the product image
• Identify and extract up to three major colors from each product and
• Map each detected color to one of 600 agreed reference colors
• Match each of the different 600 colors to the 16 colors the store published on its site.
• Deal with color combinations that are not colors, but are well known e.g., Black and White
• Run the process automatically to ensure new products are correctly and consistently tagged
• Store the new color tags against each product in Shopify and make these tags available to the store search, filter and recommendation functions.

Outcome

Frankie implemented a consistent and accurate product color tagging system for Decorators Best. This was automated and integrated with existing product search and Product filter solutions.

There was no need to manually tag products any more or manually push the results of tags from an external provider into the Decorators Best database.

Results

The new system provided noticeable improvements in the relevancy of product recommendations, product search and product filtering. “Substantial increase in revenue” - Barbara Karpf, President, Decorators Best

Why care

Ensuring key product discovery tools product recommendations, product filters and product search are optimised helps ensure you maximise  sales. Frankie is a partner that has the proven expertise to help you do this.