7 Reasons to Automate Product Tagging
(and how to do it!)

We sat down with Melbourne-based AI tech startup, Okkular, to understand how they leverage AI and deep learning to improve customer experience, reduce costs and drive sales. 2021 is going to be the year of automation, personalisation and customer experience – read on to understand why you need to care about automated product tagging.

What are product tags?

Product Tags are the secret sauce to getting products found. They’re the metadata that powers categorization, search, product descriptions and so much more. Unbelievably, this is still a manual, laborious task for many retailers, large and small. We’re in 2021 folks – time to ditch the Atari 64 and step into the future.

Very impressive increase!
I compared conversion rate for sessions using search in December to September – before any work had commenced with you guys, conversion rate lift of 31% WOW. And that’s only with the retrospective sample product!

Emma Filliponi, Blue Bunglow

Why product tags need to be automated for ecommerce

number 1

Tags Are High Quality and Free From Errors

Human error and tag-fatigue can lead to incorrect, irrelevant or even missing information. Tagging can also be subjective; what you might call violet, I might call purple. Or blue. Or lavender. Or periwinkle. Automated AI tagging removes the emotion and preconceptions, leaving only objective, unbiased product tags.

Metadata is Rich & Consistent

Products that are categorized correctly, have accurately labelled descriptions and contain rich metadata make search results more accurate. Customers can easily find what they’re looking for by filtering by product attributes, such as pattern, neckline, style, sleeve length, occasion and much more. A rich product catalog with high-quality metadata helps retailers build smooth fashion omnichannel experiences for their brand.

number 2

Conversion rates nearly doubled from people who used on-site search and found what they were looking for, yet 72% of sites fail ecommerce site search expectations.

number 3

Go-To-Market Faster

Loose the spreadsheets and tedious manual entry; tag thousands of products within minutes and get selling sooner. Image recognition-based auto tagging can automatically detect objects, colors, patterns and other detailed product attributes and accurately tag categories, subcategories, and visuals from any given image. Natural Language Processing capabilities allow text extraction from any other media content or messages you or your team may have created for each product.

Respond Quickly to Trends With Product Data

Keeping track of the granular details of all products in the inventory helps retail teams gauge their products better, interpret trends and buying behavior better, all while learning key findings of their stock. Accurately tagged items also help detect early signs of trends, helping you make smarter marketing decisions. Businesses can prepare for seasonal spikes and optimise sales campaigns.

number 4
number 5

Get Your Products Found Faster

Rich, robust metadata is essential for SEO and site search. Serve relevant products to your customers and prospects faster and more on point – you’ll see higher conversions, happier customers and more repeat business.

Forrester Research found that 43% of visitors to a site go immediately to a search boxes, and searchers are 2-3 times more likely to convert.

Provide an Exceptional Customer Experience

In the competitive world that is ecommerce, customers have a multitude of options. Provide a superior customer experience by making product discovery easy, relevant and fast. Help your customers find exactly what they’re looking for, and you’ll win at brand loyalty.

number 6
number 7

Manage Inventory Like A Pro With Enhanced Visibility

Understand exactly what products you have across your entire ecommerce system with unified product information. See the status of each item and category of items across all your sales channels and easily match demand and supply.

We have recently partnered with Okkular to assist in automating the product enrichment process by using Okkular’s tag-gen function. This function uses AI driven tools to visually analyse our product images and automatically apply relevant tags to enrich our product feed to improve the search functionality on our website to help customers find products more efficiently resulting in an impact in conversion.

Libby Spiteri, Kookai

How it’s done

Product tagging with Comestri and Okkular

It all starts with your PIM (Product Information Management). Your PIM is where your product information is stored in a logical and efficient structure. It is the single source of truth for all product data; a PIM provides a central hub where ecommerce product data is enriched, standardised and categorised.

Product URLs and images are sent from Comestri’s PIM to Okkular, where AI technology is used to visually search the image to create product tags. The tags (or attributes) sent back to Comestri are optimised for search, ensuring products are found and customers have an amazing product experience.

From here, products can be pushed out to your ecommerce site, sales & marketing channels, marketplaces, business systems and more. Like a product demo? REQUEST ONE HERE.

Where to next? Check out our article:

Product Content That Converts

Get your products found, increase conversions and reduce returns with a touch of content magic.

About Okkular

Okkular is a Melbourne based Australian tech startup. We leverage AI and deep learning to create solutions for retailers to improve customer experience, reduce costs by automating labour-intensive task and drive sales with insightful automation and personalisation. A pioneer in our industry we have some of Australia’s biggest eCommerce and retail brands working with us, the likes of Myer, Kookai, Blue Bungalow to name a few.

Like to know more? Check out www.okkular.io.

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