How Selency accelerated time-to-market and slashed image editing expenses by 89%
The challenge: To keep up with rapid growth, Selency needed to find and implement an advanced image editing solution to list a growing product catalog of 700,000+ vintage resale items.
Our solution: Photoroom’s world-class AI-powered Background Remover API boosted Selency’s photo editing workflow, enhancing overall business operations.
Results: Selency’s business-critical product listing processing is now 200 times faster and overall image processing is 89% cheaper.
Streamlining product image processing to keep up with rapid growth
When Selency—one of the largest online marketplaces for quality secondhand furniture and decor in Europe—started to scale quickly, they knew their image processing solution with a 24 hour turn-around time was no longer going to cut it.
As a front door to more than 700,000 unique and beautiful vintage pieces sold by professional dealers and non-professional sellers alike, publishing new product listings quickly is essential to Selency’s ongoing success and a critical part of its day-to-day operations. Quality images are a key part of that equation. Clear, clean, and sleek product photos allow potential buyers to select items and avoid scrolling fatigue, while maintaining authentic visual representation of the product.
Before selecting Photoroom, Selency had outsourced all of its image editing workflow to an external vendor that combined automated and manual processes, using a legacy File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to transmit images. This process took at least 24 hours to complete each time the reseller needed to add new product listings to their booming online marketplace.
Given Selency’s scale and business growth goals, the upscale online flea market needed to find a more modern, robust solution that would speed up this process ten-fold. That’s when they turned to Photoroom.
“The Photoroom API is so efficient that we use it for all our marketplace’s images.” - Vincent Paulin, Chief Technology Officer, Selency
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Simpler, faster, and more scalable image processing with the Photoroom API
After researching a number of photo editing vendors and testing image samples with a few top choices, Selency found that the Photoroom API best served its purposes and also produced the best results. To add to the plus sides of going in this new, exciting direction, adding Photoroom’s Background Remover API into the company website’s backend was a smooth integration that quickly proved a strong return on investment (ROI).
Selency quickly adapted their backend to integrate an automated workflow that uses the Photoroom API to remove backgrounds before the product moderation process. After making a few minor updates to their back office, the popular marketplace was ready to put the new API to work. And when creating customized image templates presented a challenge, the Photoroom team worked closely with the Selency team to quickly design a sustainable solution.
Today, Selency’s product image moderation process is far simpler and faster than it used to be. Now, when a seller lists a new product on Selency’s online marketplace, a quick call to the Photoroom API automatically recenters and resizes the image, removes the background, and adds a white one. Next, the Selency team validates the product and its main listing image by reviewing and comparing the original and the edited versions. Then they decide whether to publish the edited image on the Selency website.
“The additional plus of the Photoroom API is its optimal price point for us.” - Vincent Paulin, Chief Technology Officer, Selency
Selency cuts listing time to seconds and reduces costs by 89% with Photoroom
By switching from their previous image processing solution to Photoroom, Selency has reduced their new product listing/publication time from at least 24 hours to just seconds. This business-critical process is now also 89% less expensive than it was through the company’s legacy vendor and has shown a processing accuracy of 80%. The other 20% is quickly resolved with minimal manual intervention.
“The ability to perform all these operations automatically, with one API, and to get the result in near real time is really a game changer for us.” - Vincent Paulin, Chief Technology Officer, Selency
Ready to integrate Photoroom? Learn more about our API here. If you plan to process more than 500,000 images per year, contact us to meet with our experts.
