A complete Guide for Automated Product Tagging in E-Commerce

E-commerce sites are around for some time and are now becoming an absolute requirement to all retail stores. Certain retailers are even shutting down their stores in physical locations and focusing their efforts on the e-commerce market. For instance, in August the year 2019, Fortune reported it was announced that Zara, as well as H&M, were “closing their stores to get ahead.” In this decision, majors of the fashion industry are responding to the growing popularity of e-commerce by shifting their resources toward online sales.

They’re absolutely right to make this prediction. The previous predictions suggested that in 2020 we’d see the total in the range of 2.05 billion online consumers. Yet, with the new COVID-19 scenario this number is likely to rise even higher, particularly in the fashion sector.

In the event of an outbreak of the virus that is growing, 27.5% of US internet users reported they were avoiding public spaces and 58% will stay clear of them in the future if the coronavirus outbreak becomes more severe. While malls are predicted to be among the most avoided areas, however, more than half of those who use them are not shopping generally.

The epidemic is changing the face of e-commerce. We anticipate the majority of customers to shop online. This applies to the fashion industry as well. In addition to the traditional “enjoying the comfort of their own homes” motive that shoppers are now using this to protect themselves.

Retailers must develop a user-friendly, convenient method of online shopping that can satisfy the requirements of their clients. They’ll need to prepare to undergo a massive transformation from physical shops to e-commerce stores.

But this isn’t easy. Particularly for businesses that sell many products on their shelves. The sheer number of products either for visitors or both can mean lots of events on-site that can be difficult to control. To be successful shops require a reliable catalogue management system. So we’ll look at how to accomplish this.

Challenges of product catalog management

 

Catalogues of products are an online catalog where all online products of a retail store can be precisely ordered. Catalog management is a method that arranges the products within catalogs in a certain way to ensure they are consistent and useful. Modification and optimization of the information about products are also part of this.

The catalog should include details like the names of categories and their prices brands, colors suppliers, and other information pertinent to the product. The tag categories must be correctly ordered to make it easier for clients to locate the appropriate product.

Management of catalogs can be easy. The more well-organized the products on the catalog are, the better it assists companies to promote their products through channels, and also increases the amount of product exploration and provides a means to convert.

Poor catalog management results in unstructured and incorrect data that is attached to the products. This can lead to many problems:

 Erratic Supply chains:

Retailers must have precise information to manage the supply chain. They should be aware of the availability of products they sell in their physical stores and warehouses and be sure that they are able to match the items available in their online stores.

Imagine expanding your retail company to ship millions of items each year. In order to do this goal, you need to be able to integrate all of your online as well as offline information.

Inaccurate information on catalogues of products can cause differences in supply and demand which results in a loss of time money in warehouses full of unsold products. A well-organized catalog management system is essential in ensuring optimal cost as well as efficient shipping. Additionally, it helps retailers prepare to respond to the needs of shoppers in real-time.

 

A complex digitization process

Every day and need to be managed and ready for sale. The products that are placed in the warehouse before being sold in the physical stores have to be digitally digitized and put into the online catalog. This process begins with the creation of lots of information about the item and takes some time.

An unorganized catalog can make this process more time-consuming and more complex. Online retailers must develop an efficient digitization process in order to ensure their items are accessible to customers right after their launch.

Search results that are not correct

Incorrect catalog information means inaccurate results for searches. It’s an issue since it is typically the first thing that users do when they go to a site. If the information on the product is not correct then the search engine will return the incorrect results. To provide customers with an enjoyable shopping experience it is essential for them to locate the items they’re seeking easily.

Incorrect results can cause the user to leave immediately. Furthermore, people typically aren’t precise in their searches, which means that the search engine must be extremely smart to understand what they are looking for.

Search results that are not correct can cause more results because what users find and buy could differ from the information tagged with it. The issue with this is that shopping online shopping experience must be taken care of because According to Shopify the search tool can account for up to 13.8 per cent of online sales.

The solution to these problems is to have rich and well-organized catalog management. This is the definition of a simple, tidy catalogue that includes all information that is accurately and efficiently organized.

How can you obtain an efficiently-managed catalog?

In the first place, all items need to be labelled. Catalogues can contain thousands of items, and they must all be properly labelled, with specific details. The traditional methods of analyzing and labelling an image of a product can be very lengthy and tiring. Catalog tagging can consume many weeks of work for one person. This procedure requires focus and precision, which means errors can occur quickly.

Additionally, all tags have to be placed in the right context. Tags aren’t only about specific characteristics that the item. They should also be considered in relation to the product, meaning those who are conducting the labelling and analysis must be trained on the specific products that are tagged.

The increasing number of products and their specifications make manual catalog tagging nearly impossible. Fortunately, the advancements of AI provide the solution to this crucial problem for online sellers- automated taggers.

Here’s a way to automatically tag products in online retail. It’s explained here:

What is automated product tagging?

Every item in an online store is tagged with a number of different tags which define its features, characteristics and the category it’s in. Every item has different tags, which means that each product is different.

These tags provide everything a consumer must be aware of about the product: colour size, measurement of a brand, usage sale and more. A dress, for instance, may have tags such as red evening, midi silk, summer and long-sleeved, summer sale and more.

Customers and customers are required to find out information about the product via the tags. Tags play a significant role in influencing consumers’ purchase decisions. They help them sort products according to the categories they wish to look into.

The use of descriptive tags enhances the online store’s filters, which allows customers to find what they’re searching for in a matter of minutes. Effective descriptive tags provide a deeper understanding of the customer’s needs and preferences, even without a history of shopping. They offer smart analytics that assists in making informed decisions.

Tagging products can also be a method to organize the catalog of products. Additionally, the products are more useful when they are labeled with the appropriate keywords. However manual tagging a fashion item is often incorrect. It’s more difficult when stores have huge inventory management, as tags for fashion products can last for years.

Automatic taggers for products is a procedure that is here to end manual product tagging. Automatic tagging categories and tags images in the catalog of products by their attributes by leveraging the latest Artificial Intelligence algorithms. Because of Deep Learning, these algorithms can speed up the fashion tagging process, making it more automated, and removing humans from involvement. It’s essentially a process that creates rich metadata to cataloging assets. It operates in a manner that scans an image and identifies the elements that are linked to specific keywords.

Automatic taggers are skilled Artificial Intelligence systems that can detect clothing in images just as humans recognize clothing in images as we. It is just a glance at an image to identify an item of clothing to determine the type of clothing it is -for example, a dress, jacket or a pair of jeans. Computers have to do an easy task which is why the majority of managing inventory is handled by humans.

Thanks to the advances in Computer Vision and Deep Learning researchers have developed Neural Networks that mimic the human brain and can be trained to detect the images like we humans do. The Neural Networks can take an image, process it and then provide us with semantic data in the shape of the text.

To enable AI computers and other computer-vision algorithms to determine if a particular garment is a fashion item visible in images, they will need to gain knowledge from a large number of photos on what clothes and clothing look and what features can be used to define the items. This is exactly what fashion tagging is. A trained AI system that has seen thousands of images of fashion and meticulously labelled. It is now able to do the same thing, perform fashion tagging with various attributes and categories.

When the process is automated it is the Deep Learning algorithm processes the pixels of images such as videos or images to extract their features and identify objects of interest. A fashion product tag that is an automated model can speed up catalog processing times by up to 90 per cent.

Through the use of the automatic tagging system every image receives a uniform taxonomy and has several attributes labels attached. Automatically recognizing visual features gives more than just generic tags. They provide deep, specific information about fashion products.

After a time, apart from collecting data for catalogues fashion tags collect data about their usage as well as who specifically is using them, as well as their connection with other tags.

There are many different kinds of products that don’t have just one tag. Actually, the items may include a variety of tags. For instance, an image of a blue t-shirt with flowers may have many different tags for fashion that are created to it by AI technology–“blue shirt”, “flower shirt”, “slim-fit”, “formal”, “long-sleeve”, “buttoned-shirt”, etc. While the customer may not remember to search at a blue shirt the AI technology will take all product descriptions and specifications for features into account. This allows customers who are searching for a blue shirt or a slim-fit t-shirt to locate the exact shirt in the catalogue.

A tagging automation tool can cut down on the time required to tag items and enhances the accuracy of fashion tags as well as the website’s search results, and can play significant roles in reducing operating costs. Brands can utilize automated tagging to cut down on the amount of human effort and thus reduce the chance of making mistakes in the process of fashion tagging. Furthermore, it will cut down the time to market of new products through the automation of process for all digitalization activities.

Advanced image algorithms enable the entire process of image tagging to be automated . It can also be carried out within just a day which can replace weeks and days of a typical worker’s work. This is the reason why a large number of online stores have embraced this sophisticated computer vision-based technology, which makes it a crucial element of their online strategy for retail.

The development of automated taggers

First “sights” of automatic image tagging began towards the end of 2010 the time that Facebook launched its face recognition function. This feature was designed to end the manual tag of images when users uploaded images and recognized the faces on them instantly. This meant that users didn’t need to input their names to find friends–Facebook began to offer suggestions instead.

Numerous similar solutions began to appear after. But the full potential of this technology had yet to be realized. Businesses realized that these images were full of information and wanted to make the most of the data. The challenge was finding ways to handle the data and utilize it to increase the efficiency of their company.

The year 2015 was a time when Google is probably ahead of the rest in processing images. If an individual uploaded a picture, Google was able to detect what was there and offer them a category: people or places and even things.

In the year 2017, Facebook rolled out an update that announced that their automatic tagging capabilities will now be able to find images that users were tagged, and aid them in finding out who was trying to incorporate their photos into their profile photos.

The next version of the technology was offered by Google the same year when they introduced a range of auto-tagging and automatic sorting options. The new sorting options allow you to sort images based on date, location, or visual elements, such as “red”.

These advances opened the way for the introduction of automated tags in eCommerce. In the year 2017, Pinterest was one of the first platforms to implement automatic image recognition after the introduction of their visual search engine in. The new feature helped make the platform extremely popular due to the fact that people were using it more because of its visual nature that was later improved.

Then the first sellers began with the use of technology. Tags for products used in e-commerce began slowly, but gradually it has taken over the entire online retail market over the last few years. Many social platforms such as Instagram have begun to use tags–pictures are now tagged with fashion labels with information about the products that people can purchase.

In the near future, we can expect fashion retailers to embrace this technology and enhance the customer experience. When deep-learning technology advances we can expect to see more features that will revolutionize the way we sell online forever.

The Benefits of Automatic Tagging

Online retailers can reap a lot of benefits from automated taggers for their products. Here are a few:

Time to focus on crucial tasks

Since automatic image tagging for online shopping replaces the manual tag process This means that store owners, brand owners and their employees will have more time for more important duties. They can concentrate on more effective marketing campaigns, 24/7 customer service, and better store management without the need to hire new employees to perform the entire job.

Improved catalog management

A precise and accurate visual representation of the product help streamlines and organize back-end processes for products. Catalog images with precise product tags enable retailers to monitor sales, find the top searched items discover the products that aren’t popular, and keep inventory at a manageable level.

Automated product tagging allows you to organize items on various bases such as according to the brand’s name and design, style colour, or other factors. Additional tags for products are added as needed to ensure that the catalog of products is always up-to-date with the latest trends in fashion. The tags could have a significant impact on purchasing decisions, and consequently, provide greater insight into the sales analytics at the attribute level.

The incorporation of a fashion tagging system in an online store can help managers make better decisions by allowing them to get a greater view of the items available from the online retailer.

Improvement in Automated:

Tagging of fashion items is essential for a successful online shop. Catalogues of merchandise that are properly tagged improve the retail value chain. Automated workflows reduce costs and boost profits. This gives you more time to concentrate on actual customers, which means they will have the best customer experience.

Auto-tagging should not be dismissed as a convenience, but it should be viewed as the basis of the online shop. A well-organized catalog with the right tags can improve the entire retail chain, including automated work of humans in cost-saving, as well as enhanced visibility of the product. In addition, it enhances the personalized nature of the store, giving customers precisely what they’re looking to buy.