This is like using Shazam but for shopping: you snap or upload a photo of an item you like, and the app finds similar listings for sale on Mercari.
Reduces friction in product discovery by letting users search with photos instead of typing detailed keywords, which leads to more accurate matches, higher conversion, and better utilization of existing inventory.
Access to large-scale real marketplace imagery and listing data that can be used to continually improve visual search relevance, tightly integrated into Mercari’s core shopping workflow.
Hybrid
Vector Search
Medium (Integration logic)
Image embedding latency and vector search scalability at peak traffic, plus storage and re-indexing cost for large catalog image embeddings.
Early Majority
Visual search is embedded directly into the Mercari marketplace flow and optimized for secondhand listings with noisy, user-generated photos rather than clean catalog imagery.