Wayfair and ThredUp see promise in new visual search tools
This year, online furniture marketplace Wayfair started testing out visual search tools for its customers, making it one of the latest brands experimenting with how AI-powered algorithms can lead to better sales.
Whether using a photo from their camera roll, Pinterest or Wayfair advertising, customers can upload an image of what they’re looking for. Then, CTO Fiona Tan said, they’ll see a list of results from Wayfair’s inventory that include items of a similar type and aesthetic, as well as different price points. So far, it’s deployed the tool to about half its audience. The result is more instances of “add-to-cart” and higher conversions, Tan said.
“A lot of times for our customers, it’s so hard to describe what you’re looking for. You don’t know what style it is, or what something is called,” Tan said. “There are times when it’s easier for you to say, ‘Here is a picture of what I want. I want to upload it and see what you have.'”
Tan spoke to Modern Retail about Wayfair’s search efforts at Shoptalk 2025, where multiple brands touched on how they’re using AI-powered algorithms to help keep up with changing search behaviors. Image search is hardly a new tool for the online community. But it’s becoming a more common and powerful method of online shopping in recent months, with younger shoppers who load up their camera rolls and Pinterest boards with shopping inspiration.
Individual companies like Wayfair are investing in owned technologies to meet this need, while both Amazon and Google put out new in-app visual search capabilities ahead of the 2024 holiday season. But the technology still has a long way to go toward mass adoption: As of August 2024, about 10% of online shoppers said they use visual search regularly, while 17% said they’ve used it before, per the EMarketer Ecommerce Survey conducted by Bizrate Insights.
At Wayfair, Tan said visual search is particularly valuable in the furniture category because shoppers aren’t necessarily interior design experts and can’t always explain what they’re looking for.
“We’re all trained on search where there is a keyword, and you’ve got to make sure you get your keywords right and you find it. But with the LLMs and multimodal capabilities of the LLMs, it’s changed in the last 18 months,” she said.
Sean Scott, gm at Google Shopping, shared during a Shoptalk panel that nearly 20 billion searches using images are put through Google Lens each month. Around 20% of those are related to shopping, Scott said, with people using the tool to find specific items they can’t quite describe. Once identified, Lens shows users details like price across different retailers, current deals and product reviews.
“Imagine trying to describe a very textured, ornate planter with words,” he said. “It’s nearly impossible, and you’d probably never find it given all the products we have on the web. Yet, a simple picture finds it almost instantly.”
Yet, it hasn’t been universally embraced. One executive of an online apparel company that’s been using image search for about two years said that, while people use it, there is a bit of customer education required. This executive, who spoke to Modern Retail at Shoptalk on background, said that not everyone knows the button is there to upload a photo. “I think people often don’t fully know how to engage with it,” they said.
Still, some companies are finding it has a broad appeal. ThredUp, the secondhand apparel marketplace, has been using visual image search for over a year. Shoppers can upload a photo of their own, or if they’re on a product description page, they can click another button that will show them similar items in the marketplace. Danielle Vermeer, ThredUp’s head of social commerce, told Modern Retail it has been one of the most game-changing tech upgrades the company has made in recent memory. It’s particularly useful given the breadth of ThredUp’s ever-changing inventory, Vermeer said. “If you’re like me, someone who has a lot of things in their camera roll, you can just upload that directly and find thousands of similar things that match that vibe and aesthetic,” she said.
During the company’s latest earnings call, CEO James Reinhart shared that ThredUp users have conducted 1.3 million image searches that yield an 85% higher conversion rate. “Being able to find exactly those looks — combined with the technology on the back end to take whatever it is that they’re snapping or clipping or saving — it just delivers more relevant results. And so you’re seeing people then use it more,” Reinhart said.
Editor-in-chief Jill Manoff contributed reporting.