Amazon enhances online shopping experience with AI, AR

Customers can streamline shopping and searching on Amazon with new artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR) tools.

Amazon is unveiling five new site features, based on AI and AR technology, designed to enable an easier, more informative and seamless customer experience:

Using a combination of images and text for mobile search

Amazon has previously been offering customers the ability to tap the camera icon in the search bar of its app and snap a picture that the e-tailer’s visual search algorithms use to find the best possible matches across its assortment.

Recently, Amazon added a new feature to its mobile visual search tool that enables customers to add text to their visual search queries. When a shopper performs a visual search, they will see the search bar with the thumbnail of their image, along with a prompt to add text to help narrow search results. Text can include product information such as brand name or model name.

Seeing products in your space

In 2019, Amazon began enabling shoppers to place realistic 3D images of home furnishings into a virtual living room, giving customers a better sense of how they would look. The AR-based “View in Your Room” tool also enables customers to change the color of the virtual room’s walls, carpeting and the floor, as well as of the products themselves.

Now, View in Your Room allows customers to include images of tabletop items, such as lamps, home décor, and small appliances like toaster ovens and coffee makers. The new mobile experience uses AR to place the products a customer is searching for on a tabletop surface in their home.

Shoppers can also move products from one surface to another to better evaluate how they fit in their environment.

Sales trend data

Amazon recently started showing sales trend data in search results and on product detail pages, to provide more information about the products. Now, in addition to seeing whether an item has thousands of five-star reviews or is a best seller, customers also have an indicator of the product’s recent popularity.

Searching with mobile sharing feature

With a new feature called Find-on-Amazon, customers can spot a product they like anywhere online using a mobile device, tap the “share” button, choose the Amazon Shopping app, and click “Find products on Amazon.”

Customers will then be taken directly to the Amazon Shopping app, where they will see similar products, without needing to know what the item is called or how to describe it.

Easing reorders

Once the Amazon site recognizes that a customer is searching for a previously purchased item, it will present the item at the top of search results with the date of the last purchase. In cases involving a frequently reordered item, the site will also show a thumbnail image of the item in the search bar, enabling shoppers to click to the product detail page and complete the purchase.

“We know that customer trust is hard to win and easy to lose, so we pay close attention to customer feedback about the shopping experience on Amazon,” Llew Mason, VP, shopping, Amazon, said in a corporate blog post. “We’re always experimenting with ways to make it even easier to shop our store. This means that sometimes things may look different as we test new features, but our mission remains the same: to help you find what you’re looking for.”