Collectibles
Image Tools
Other industries
Discover how image recognition can help e-commerce businesses comply with new EU energy labeling regulations, ensuring a smooth transition.
The year 2021 will bring a fundamental change in the energy labelling of household appliances. Updated labelling should be more efficient, and intuitive, and enable consumers to make better and more informed purchasing decisions. A first large group of goods should be re-labelled by the beginning of March, not only in retail but also in e-shops. Even though such modification brings benefits to the buyers, it poses a great challenge to the online sellers, to which we in Ximilar have a clever solution.
The energy labels indicate the energy efficiency category the appliance falls into. In 2019, the European Union approved a new regulation setting a framework for updated energy labelling, which will come into force in 2021 and gradually replace the old system of labels. According to European lawmakers, the new system could save up to 200 billion kWh of energy, which is approximately the same amount of energy all Baltic countries spend together in a year. The first new labels are already in circulation.
Effective March 2021, sellers and manufacturers will be required to update the energy labels on fridges, washing machines, dishwashers, TVs, electronic displays, and refrigerating appliances for display purposes, followed by tyres in May, and lamps in September.
So far, the products have fallen into categories A+++ to G, which will be simplified back to A to G and the energy class of a product will be determined by higher standards. This means the appliance that was A+ in 2020 could be B or C from now on.
Re-scaling is not the only new feature, as the new labels are provided with a QR code leading consumers to the EPREL (European Product Registry for Energy Labelling) database, providing them with detailed energy and environmental information on the goods.
The new regulation applies not only to retail but also to e-commerce, meaning all e-shops will be required to re-label the household appliances as well. They will be required to do so between March 1st and 18th.
E-shops need to identify thousands of energy labels in the product galleries and replace them with the new ones.
E-shops generally upload the energy labels as pictures into the galleries on the item pages. Due to the large amounts of images they upload every day, it is not uncommon not to have them tagged.
To ensure a smooth transition from the old label system to the new one, the physical stores will focus on the re-labelling of the displayed goods. The e-shops, on the other hand, will need to identify and replace considerable amounts of pictures in their databases at once. For instance, the largest e-shop selling household appliances in the Czech Republic Alza.cz currently offers approximately 1 200 products in the category of fridges, 500 in washing machines, 350 in dishwashers, 600 TVs, and 1 200 monitors, meaning they will need to update at least 3 850 energy labels in the first wave.
Many large e-shops also cooperate with price comparison websites, such as Heureka, that have their item galleries. For such services, the problem is a bit more complex: as a price analysis tool, the comparison website acquires its data from various sellers meaning its picture tagging or sorting is not standardised, and they have to deal with a wide range of file types and names.
Such task poses a question: what is the most efficient way to identify the old energy labels amongst other images in the product galleries in order to delete and replace them? The solution lies in the image recognition software.
E-shops with electronics typically upload the energy labels as images into the product galleries on their item pages and provide them to the price comparison websites. Therefore, they need software able to sort the product images, reliably recognize the old energy labels and set them aside.
Image Recognition is one of the core services of Ximilar. In principle, once you upload your images to this service, it equips them with tags and sorts them into categories. This service uses computer vision and deep learning to detect a wide range of features in the pictures. It is designed to process extensive databases of pictures in a fraction of a second.
With Ximilar App, you can develop an AI service directly for energy label recognition.
If you need to identify and replace the old energy labels in your e-shop, there are two ways to use the Ximilar Energy Label Recognition service:
Since image recognition is a CPU/GPU-intensive process, one of the greatest advantages of this service lies in the image database processing on our servers, whether you use the API or leave it to us. Of course, you will have a chance to test the service in the Ximilar App before you run it on your image database.
The energy label recognition with the Ximilar service is an efficient, quick, and above all, reliable way to identify the images that need to be replaced.
With Ximilar you can develop more models for energy labels recognition:
If you are interested, please just fill out our contact form. We are here to help!
Whether you need to sort your catalogue into fine-grained categories, recognize pictures in product galleries, or offer similar products to your customers, Ximilar has a solution for you.
Read more in this detailed article on Image Recognition uses in e-commerce, or contact us, and we can discuss other solutions tailored to your needs.
Our AI price guide can be used for value tracking of cards and comic books, offering accurate pricing data and their history.
Get your own AI-powered comics and manga image recognition and search tool, accessible through REST API.
Optimize your product listing workflow with automated writing of product titles and descriptions.
Product Description 
Card Price Search 