Shoe Carnival, the US footwear and accessories retailer with 400 stores, has launched a visual search tool for consumers visiting its website via mobile, with the technology provided by visual product search platform Slyce.

The technology enables mobile visitors to ShoeCarnival.com to snap a picture of any footwear, either in the real-world, or from sources such as magazine pages, and, with no time latency, be presented with all direct or closest matching products from the Shoe Carnival product line. These items can then be bought with just a few taps.

“Were very excited to be launching mobile visual search functionality with Slyce,” said Kent Zimmerman, VP of eCommerce at Shoe Carnival. “Mobile is a big part of our multichannel strategy, and were always looking for ways to stay ahead of the innovation curve and provide our customers with the most convenient shopping experience possible.”

Slyce will derive revenues from the contract through monthly recurring software licensing and service fees, in line with its current pricing model, over the term of the contract.

David Murphy writes:
This is a clever bit of tech, though in a quick test just now, it was only partially successful. I photographed the same Adidas Samba trainer four times from within the ShoeCarnival website. Each time I got a message asking me to crop the image to cut out as much of the background as I could without cropping out any of the shoe. Three times, I saw no image, the fourth time the image did load, I cropped it and the site brought up its closest matches. Shooting an image from a magazine, I made three attempts without success. This was on an iPhone 6.

For the record, my colleague Alex Spencer shot a shoe in the wild and another from another eCommerce website and both worked first time, so he had a better experience than I did. When it works, it’s great, but for me at least, it didn’t work every time,.