Fishpond is an innovative, international e-commerce company headquartered in Auckland, New Zealand and with offices in the UK and USA. Established in 2004, Fishpond is now the largest single source e-commerce product supplier in the world, with over 25 million unique products and free global shipping to over 80 countries. In the last 12 months, Fishpond has sold a product every 1.2 seconds and gained a new customer every 5.9 seconds.

As an online retailer, connecting with the customer is critical to continued success and creating a seamless experience for those who are shopping is an integral part of that connection. Fishpond are always searching for new ways to allow customers to find what they are looking for and offer an increased choice with a large, long-tail range of over 25 million products. An ever present challenge in today’s retail environment is to also stay ahead of the competition by giving customers new ways to find what they want.

After reviewing a number of technologies and providers Fishpond decided to engage Alibaba Cloud to work on developing a feature to enable them to gain better engagement with customers and allow for enhanced search functions within their websites. As Ben Powles, CEO of Fishpond explains “Modern e-commerce is about delivering the right price, on the right product, at the right time, completely seamlessly. By utilising an image recognition solution from Alibaba Cloud, our customers can now search our diverse and large-scale product catalogue with the snap of a photo.”

This solution has enabled customers to instantly find similar products to those they have in front of them or find online via social media feeds. Leveraging technology Alibaba currently utilized on its own marketplaces, Fishpond were able to work with the local Alibaba Cloud teams to develop a custom solution for Fishponds websites in Australia and New Zealand.

The image search functionality and massive scalability is perfect for Fishpond’s huge range of products as Powles highlights “With over 2 million toys, 1.8 million Homeware products, 1.6 million beauty products, just to name a few, we needed an innovative solution that could scale to match our customers’ needs but remain lightweight and, above all, simple to use.

The technology required to visually search through literally millions of products, in seconds, was unprecedented - the fact that the user experience is so simple and seamless is a hallmark of what cutting-edge CX and UX design should be.”

Looking ahead, Fishpond are excited about what the future will hold for online businesses and the retail sector as a whole, as technology continues to allow brands and markteplaces to strengthen their connection with customers. “When used right, technology should empower and simplify the User Experience - in this case, we have achieved that in spades, and delivered an innovative new way to shop that is unrivaled in our market.” Powles explains.

Staying ahead of the curve, by implementing innovate technologies like this from Alibaba Cloud, means the future is certainly bright for Fishpond.