Starting point
A furniture manufacturer in northern Germany with modular upholstered furniture. 32,000 variants, 8 fabrics × 14 colors × various sizes per model. 70% of orders are placed on mobile, 95% of customers arrive inspired by image search and inspiration from Pinterest or Instagram.
The existing search offered:
- Standard full-text search on model names
- No visual search, no style filters
- For “red leather sofa 3-seater”, the default image was shown, not the red variant
- Mobile conversion at 0.8%, desktop at 2.1%
Goal
First: offer mobile-capable visual search. Second: context-based variant images, so “red leather sofa” actually shows the red sofa. Third: style directions (Boho, Scandi, Industrial) as a hard filter, not as full text.
Implementation
Day 0–2: setup
Catalog indexing including variant images. Visual AI Search module activated (add-on). Style taxonomy from the top 3,000 products prepared via Eywora auto-tagging.
Day 3–6: style and color synonyms
One team member from the customer side reviewed the automatic style-tagging suggestions in a morning session. 86% of the suggestions could be accepted as is, the rest was corrected manually. Color synonyms (anthracite/dark grey/graphite etc.) were added.
Day 7–9: live and A/B
Visual search button placed in the mobile frontend. Classic search remains in parallel. A/B split by device.
Result
| Metric | Before | With Eywora |
|---|---|---|
| Conversion on mobile | 0.8% | 1.05% |
| CTR visual search | n/a | 58% |
| Bounce rate on search | 41% | 27% |
| Queries with style term | 4% hits | 91% hits |
What wasn’t obvious
Three points from practice:
- Auto-tagging wasn’t 100% correct. We had to plan a morning session in which one person reviewed the top suggestions. That was more work than initially thought, but one-off.
- Color synonyms are region-specific. “Taupe” has different connotations in DE/CH. After 2 weeks of live data, we refined the synonym set.
- The mobile layout needed slight adjustment. The visual search icon needed more prominence. That was a 30-minute frontend tweak on the customer side, not an Eywora topic.
Economic impact
- +31% mobile conversion in the first 60 days
- Visual search became the second most important search path after classic input within 4 weeks
- Style-based search reduced the number of assortment hotline calls by ~15%
In the customer team’s own words
“Our customers search with an image in their head. Before, they had to translate that into words and fail. Now they can simply upload the image. That has completely flipped our conversion logic.”