Europe's largest furniture search engine moebel.de relies on vviinn

The Company

Moebel.de is Europe’s largest search engine for home furnishing ideas. Since its launch over 20 years ago, the ‘Furnishing Google’ has pursued its vision of guiding every user quickly and directly to the right furniture supplier. The platform contains offers from more than 500 online stores and local retailers with a total of over five million products.

The Challenge

On moebel.de, users can find by far the largest selection of furniture and furnishing products on the Internet. In this abundance of millions of products, the most important thing is to provide orientation.

“We want users to find their desired product as easily and quickly as possible,” says moebel.de Chief Product Officer Michael Eberlin. Price transparency is the central concern here. The ability to make a direct comparison is a decisive criteria for users.”

If you want to compare prices, you also need to be able to compare products accurately. This is where conventional text-based searches have reached their limits in the past. Often, imprecise terms are the problem. Is the furniture you are looking for a sideboard or a cabinet? Is the sofa a two-seater? What do you call this shade of green? Plus, different suppliers sell very similar or even identical furniture under different product names. This can also make a direct comparison difficult.

The Solution

Moebel.de has been relying on vviinn’s technology since fall 2023. Our AI-based visual search solution taps into the potential of Europe’s largest image database in the home and furnishing sector and now uses the ‘superpower’ of product images.

When a user clicks on details of a wardrobe at moebel.de, a selection of similar models automatically appears on the screen or cellphone display. Our algorithm analyzes more than 1000 features of a photo in a fraction of a second and suggests stylistically matching products on this basis. In the past, the user would have been taken directly to the retailer’s website. Customers now have better comparison options and more of them. The likelihood of finding the right wardrobe is much greater compared with conventional recommendation methods.

Users at moebel.de can also upload a photo of their desired furniture directly via the search mask and immediately receive a selection of similar products. This intuitive form of search usually matches the customer’s expectations much better than searches based on keywords and terms.

Michael Eberlin adds: “We observed the market closely and looked at various visual search solutions. Vviinn convinced us the most. In tests, their AI recognized the focused motif in 90 percent of all cases and delivered very good product suggestions.

We have optimized our software specifically for the needs of online furniture retailers. Vviinn’s strengths include the recognition of materials and surfaces, as well as the processing of very large amounts of data.

We are proud that moebel.de has chosen vviinn and that we can now demonstrate the performance of our technology on the largest online platform in the industry. We look forward to further collaboration.