Etsy is using Apple’s Augmented Reality (AR) tools to help shoppers visualize items in their spaces before making a purchase using the Etsy app. The marketplace first rolled out AR features in the Wall Art category in 2020 and has since expanded it from two-dimensional to 3D to include items in the Home Furnishings category, such as side tables.
Nearly a million Etsy items now have real-size AR functionality added to them, viewed by tens of thousands of Etsy users every week, according to a post by Senior Software Engineers Pedro Michel and Mahreen Ijaz on Etsy’s Code as Craft engineering blog.
“We took steps to improve how we parse seller-provided data, and we used this data with Apple’s AR technology to make it easy for Etsy users to understand the size and scale of an object they might want to buy,” the engineers explained. “We decided we could make tape measures obsolete (or at least not quite as essential) for our home-decor shoppers by building an AR tool to let them visualize–conveniently, accurately, and with minimal effort–how an item would fit in their space.”
Home decor is a priority for Etsy – in 2022, Etsy CEO Josh Silverman told Wall Street that the Home Furnishings category was generating billions of dollars of sales on the marketplace. “We are beginning as we look in to 2023 to think more seriously about investing in some vertical experiences,” he said in November 2022. “Like what are some things you need when you’re buying home furnishings that are specific to the category of Home Furnishings. And I think we’ll find that there are some areas where building category-specific features are going to be valuable.”
The blog post gets technical, but it describes some of the same issues eBay faces with unstructured data. For example, Michel and Ijaz wrote, “Sellers often provide dimensions in inconsistent units, for instance, or they might add the same data multiple times in different fields, when there are variations in properties like material or color.” The pair explained how Etsy engineers dealt with the challenge – see the full post on the September 18th Etsy Code as Craft blog.
