Citation:

Nitin Patki, 2026. "Revolutionizing Online Shopping: The Power of Multimodal Search in E-Commerce", ESP Journal of Engineering & Technology Advancements  6(1): 12-17.

Abstract:

For two decades, the atomic unit of e-commerce has been the keyword. However, as AI evolves from a tool that helps humans find products to an agent that buys them on our behalf, the keyword is no longer sufficient. This article examines the watershed moment of multimodal search—the transition where digital catalogs stop being static lists of text and become dynamic ecosystems that can "see" and "listen." We break down the physics of meaning behind vector embeddings, the battle between "build vs. buy" search strategies, and the rise of 3D spatial indexing. Ultimately, we demonstrate why the retailers that thrive in the next decade will be those that re-architect their systems not just to be visible to humans, but to be intelligible to the algorithm.

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Keywords:

Multimodal AI Search, E-commerce, Visual Search Technology, Voice Search for Retail, Vision-Language Models (VLMs), CLIP Model E-commerce, Semantic Search Algorithms, Neural Search Engine.