Shop with your camera — introducing Trade Me for Bixby Vision

How many of your recent interactions with your smartphone began with the camera app? Take a picture of this, share a picture of that, live stream this, look up that! Many* of our Trade Me members can now also use their camera to find the next thing they’ll love.

Why use the camera to shop?

There is nothing wrong with typing into Trade Me’s search bar. This is how Trade Me has worked for almost two decades. The choice between a text search and an image search comes down to whether you’re looking for the exact thing that you typed in or similar things to the ones you and your camera are looking at. Think of Trade Me for Bixby Vision as a discovery tool that is always available in your pocket!

We think it’ll shine in the Home & Living, Electronics, and Fashion categories as the app can help when you’re thinking “hey, I want a yellow bar stool like that”, “hmm, I’d like glasses like that”, or “I wonder if can get a better deal for something like this on Trade Me”.

How it works

More and more people look for convenience when shopping online. With more than 20 million searches coming from Samsung devices every week, it made sense to partner with Samsung New Zealand to leverage the AI capabilities in both Bixby and Trade Me’s search algorithms.

The app receives images taken on the Samsung device, then turns that image into search results on Trade Me. In practice, the image is fed into a machine learning algorithm that finds similar (new) products, based on category, keyword and, in some instances, colour. These search results are then shown instantly within the camera app, which makes purchasing a breeze.

Get started

If you already own an eligible* Samsung Galaxy device, all you need to do is:

• Launch Bixby Vision.
• Install the Trade Me for Bixby Vision app from the Downloads section.
• Point the camera at something you want.

Easy!

What’s next?

This app is just a glimpse into what shopping will look like in the future. In time we expect the search results to become more relevant as we train and retrain our algorithms. Machine learning (and artificial intelligence) relies on continuous iterations in order to improve the accuracy of predictions/results. We’re just at the beginning of this technological journey, and we can’t wait to bring this functionality to even more of our members in the future.

*Trade Me for Bixby Vision is currently available on Samsung premium smartphones, including the Galaxy Note9, Note8, S9, S9+, S8, S8+, and even the Galaxy Tab S4 and Galaxy Tab 10.5” tablets.