Online furniture retailer streamlines visual merchandising with AI

Coleman Furniture is building visually focused customer journeys around the products customers are most likely to buy.

Based in Cedarhurst, N.Y., Coleman Furniture manufactures and sells furniture through its e-commerce site. The company is leveraging the AI-based visual product discovery platform from Syte to automatically create personalized customer journeys.

Coleman Furniture serves the products an individual customer is most likely to buy, in the way they most prefer to shop. For example, goal-oriented consumers can use smart text and visual search functionalities, while inspiration-minded shoppers can navigate through product photos and recommendations.

The Syte platform combines three product suites that are based on proprietary AI technology which uses two visual similarity algorithms to automatically categorize items within a catalog and enrich product meta-tags. The platform includes a visual discovery suite offering tools including image search and product recommendations, which use visual AI to help shoppers find items similar to any product they like within a brand’s website. 

In addition, the Syte platform includes a hyper-personalization suite that combines real-time behavior with visual data to recommend the most relevant products for any given shopper, as well as a “searchandising” suite consisting of product tagging and e-commerce site search solutions that use visual AI to enrich product data and search accuracy. 

The solutions are managed and customized through a central console that provides data visibility, deep analytics, A/B testing tools, and smart merchandising rules and ranking strategies. 

“We knew that to provide the customer experience our visitors are expecting, we needed to go above and beyond to make product discovery easy and personalized to each shopper's journey,” said Michael Stein, head of e-commerce, Coleman Furniture. “Our need is to make it as simple as possible for customers to shop and find both products they are looking for and the products they want but didn't know existed. As soon as we partnered with Syte, customers could easily find products they love, and conversion and average order value increased significantly.”