Dive Brief:
- To enhance the shopping experience on its app, Poshmark released Posh Lens, a tool that lets shoppers use photos to search for secondhand items, the company announced Wednesday. With the tool, users can upload or take a picture of the item they want and look through available listings of their desired item or a similar product.
- The tool is available for women's apparel, men's clothing, shoes and bags. It uses artificial intelligence and visual search technology from Naver, a South Korean firm that acquired Poshmark earlier this year, to conduct image searches.
- The app is currently available on iOS and Android for U.S. customers. The company said the feature aims to drive traffic to sellers' digital closets and connect them with interested shoppers.
Dive Insight:
After being acquired by Naver for about $1.2 billion, Poshmark has begun integrating Naver's capabilities into its secondhand goods business. Following the acquisition, Naver CEO Sooyeon Choi noted that its technologies could assist Poshmark through improved search functionality, e-commerce tools and artificial intelligence-driven product recommendations.
Beyond adding visual search to its platform, Poshmark has also added a livestream shopping capability in April. Through Posh Shows, sellers can list the products, ship the items that customers buy and tag descriptions of their broadcast.
"The launch of Posh Lens is just the beginning of how we are working with Naver to deliver new innovation to the Poshmark community," Manish Chandra, founder and CEO of Poshmark, said in a statement. "Our sellers have curated an extensive and unique catalog of merchandise, and Posh Lens offers shoppers the ability to turn their inspiration into reality and track down special pieces with a single photo."
Meanwhile, other retail and tech companies have developed visual search tools recently. In 2021, Google enabled users to make images on the pages they visited searchable and shoppable. In December 2022, Walmart unveiled TrendGetter, an image recognition feature that lets shoppers upload pictures of their desired items and find discounts on them or similar products.
