Visual product search platform Slyce and consumer engagement marketing platform Offerpop have announced a partnership that will see the two retail-tech companies produce a user-generated social shopping platform with automated visual recognition.

The Offerpop platform enables brands to deploy a shoppable engagement experience that encourages customers to share their own product photos through social media. Offerpop then aggregates this content to create dynamic visual galleries that can be featured across all of the brands digital properties.

Marketers have run over 200,000 engagement programs through Offerpops platform, collecting more that 26m pieces of user-generated content. However, up until now, tagging the user-generated content has been undertaken manually, often requiring a 24 hour turnaround period.

By integrating Slyces visual search technology, new levels of sophistication and automation are brought to the solution, automatically matching products within authentic users images to those in the brands product line, rendering the user-generated content shoppable in all-but-real-time.

“Theres no question, the ability to make user generated content shoppable is incredibly powerful for retailers,” said Mark Elfenbein, CEO of Slyce. “The work and cost incurred in staging products for marketing photography is substantial.

“If customers can be incentivised to become advocates of a brand, submitting their own images of products within great environments – and if those products can then be purchased seamlessly by others – that is major disruption.”

“Working with Slyce on this initiative has been an absolute please,” said Prakash Mishra, CTO of Offerpop. “Their groundbreaking automation solution coupled with our powerful UGC platform will help brands organically convert users into consumers, with minimal intervention on the marketers part. We couldnt be more excited!”