# AI for e-commerce: visual search, cart recovery and assistants > Mirai Minds builds AI for e-commerce and retail: visual product search from a photo or a reel, AI voice calls that follow up on abandoned carts, a Shopify app for voice agents, and catalog assistants that answer from real product data. These run for an Indian ethnic-wear brand, in a resin manufacturer's pilot and on our Voice Agents platform. ## Key facts - **Visual search:** Catalog photos and reel frames in one index - **Cart recovery:** Abandoned checkouts checked every 5 minutes - **Shopify:** Embedded app with order, product and discount permissions - **Channels:** Phone calls, WhatsApp and on-site chat - **Cash on delivery:** COD charges included in recovery-call context ## Use cases - **Visual search from a photo or a reel** (shipped by Mirai Minds): Staff photograph a product, or a video playing on a screen, and get matching catalog items back. - **Abandoned-cart recovery calls** (shipped by Mirai Minds): An AI voice agent calls about the actual cart, with items, totals and the cash-on-delivery charge. - **Catalog assistant** (shipped by Mirai Minds): Answers product questions from catalog data and shows product cards only from real search results. - **Shopify-connected voice agent** (shipped by Mirai Minds): Checks orders, answers product questions and can create discount codes through an embedded Shopify app. - **WhatsApp follow-up after a call** (shipped by Mirai Minds): When the voice agent promises to send something, a WhatsApp message follows the call. - **Returns and exchange triage** (typical): Sort return and exchange requests by reason and route the unusual ones to a person. ## Where does AI pay off in e-commerce? Where a customer or a staff member is one step from a sale and gets stuck. A shopper sees a product in a video and can't name it. A customer leaves a checkout half-finished. A buyer has a question about a product at 11 at night. Each of those is a lost order that a small, well-scoped AI system can win back, as long as it works from real catalog and order data rather than from a model's guesses. Mirai Minds builds three kinds of e-commerce systems: visual search, follow-up on abandoned carts by phone and WhatsApp, and catalog assistants. Each is described below with the client it was built for. ## How does visual search work on photos and reels? For an [ethnic-wear e-commerce brand in India](/work/ecommerce-visual-search-and-cart-recovery), staff needed to find products from what customers show them, which is often a photo or a marketing reel rather than a product name. We built a search service that holds an image-embedding index of two kinds of material: catalog product photos and frames from the brand's reels. A staff member takes a photo; the service scores it against both, keeps each product's best score, removes duplicates and returns the top 10 with direct product links. A reel match returns the products currently tagged in that reel. The search runs apart from the store's production database, uploads are capped at 300 KB so the round trip stays short from a phone, and every failure returns one clear message instead of a raw error. It has been live for the brand's staff since July 2026. ## Are AI cart-recovery calls worth it? They can be, and they should be measured before anyone claims they are. For the same brand, a small service checks abandoned checkouts every 5 minutes through the Shopify Admin API, skips carts it has already handled, adds the cash-on-delivery charge and asks our [Voice Agents platform](/work/voice-agents-platform) to place a call with the cart as context. The agent talks about the actual items and totals rather than reading a generic script. What we don't have yet is a clean recovery number. The only honest way to get one is a holdout group of abandoned carts that receive no call, compared over the same weeks, because some customers come back on their own. Until that result exists, we won't publish a rate. ## What does the Shopify app do? Our Voice Agents platform has an embedded Shopify app. A store connects it with permission to read customers, orders and products and to create discount codes. Voice agents can then check an order's status, answer product questions and offer a time-limited discount on a recovery call. After each call a model fills structured fields, such as whether a callback was requested and when, and if the agent promised to send something on WhatsApp, a message follows. Stores on other platforms can connect through webhooks and APIs instead. ## What about chat on the store itself? For a [resin manufacturer in India](/work/resin-catalogue-assistant) we built a pilot catalog assistant. Shoppers ask in plain language or upload a photo; an agent decides whether to search the catalog, ranks products with hybrid semantic and keyword search, and shows product cards only from real results. Greetings don't trigger a search, so products never appear attached to small talk. The pilot runs on a 15-product sample, which tests behavior but can't yet measure retrieval quality. For conversations that continue over days, the same ideas run on WhatsApp through our [WhatsApp AI agents](/services/whatsapp-ai-agents) work. ## What do you need to get started? Access to your catalog and order data (a read-only API key is enough for a first version), a sample of real customer questions or photos, and a person who owns the result. For recovery calls, add the hours you are allowed to call and your discount rules. Most builds take two to eight weeks. The technology behind these systems is described under [computer vision](/services/computer-vision) and [voice AI agents](/services/voice-ai-agents). ## Frequently asked questions ### Will AI calls annoy customers who abandoned a cart? They can, if they are badly timed or generic. Timing, relevance and an easy way to opt out matter more than the script. We call about the actual cart, keep the call short and set calling hours with you, and opt-outs and complaints should be tracked alongside recovered orders. ### Does visual search work on photos of screens? Yes, by design. Frames from marketing reels are indexed next to catalog photos, and a reel match returns the products tagged in that reel, so a photo of a video playing on a screen still finds the item. ### Do we need Shopify? No. Shopify has our deepest integration: an embedded app for voice agents and its Admin API for abandoned checkouts. The same pieces work with any store that exposes orders, products and checkouts through an API or webhooks. ### How do you measure whether it's working? For recovery calls, with a holdout group of carts that get no call, compared over the same weeks; without one the numbers flatter the calls. For visual search, by how often staff find the product in the top results. We don't publish a recovery rate yet because we don't have a clean holdout result. --- Canonical: https://www.miraiminds.co/industries/ecommerce-retail Last updated: 2026-09-23 Publisher: Mirai Minds LLP, 906 Sarthana Business Hub, Nana Varachha, Surat, Gujarat 395013, India. hello@miraiminds.co