Getting its in-stock inventory online as soon as possible is paramount for this retailer. Every hour the product is not online and available to customers costs the retailer sales.

remove.bg has reduced the two days previously allocated to sending images offshore for background removal down to two minutes, improving profit margins on up to 60,000 items a year and reducing the cost-per-image by 60%.

This e-commerce store’s online product offerings are brought to life by posting approximately 3 million images a year, about five per item. If the retailer decides images will take more than a few minutes to process, those images are sent offshore to have a clipping path applied and the backgrounds removed. This takes a minimum of two hours, with images returning for an in-house QA process.

For the retailer, two hours is a long time when it comes to posting in-stock items, and the QA process adds additional labor costs. Getting these images online as quickly as possible is imperative to move products to market ASAP and beat competitors selling the same product. This approach also helps the company get ahead of its automated markdown cycle.

“Speed is definitely an important factor for us,” says the company’s Creative Production Manager. “Once the markdown cycle begins, it’s like an ice cube headed toward the sun!”

This cycle can significantly impact the company’s profit margin; items that sell for multiple hundreds of dollars going for far less as the cycle progresses, with items moving to clearance options.

“If an item doesn't sell within a few weeks, something happens. If it doesn't sell within another few weeks, something else happens. If it doesn't sell within a couple more weeks, something else happens. And all these 'somethings' result in diminishing margins. So, at some point, that item is practically given away. Anything that we could bring back in-house and turn around very quickly provides a tangible advantage.”

The goal, then, is to clear the production queue for in-stock items on the same day.

Not all images need to have their backgrounds removed. The primary focus is on photos of products from external manufacturers.

“They’ve got a variety of backgrounds and details that we would not have on our website,” says the Creative Production Manager. "The customer can’t be visually bombarded with everybody's unique idea of what's beautiful. We have an intimate relationship with our customers and a sense of their aesthetic preferences, and that understanding guides the visual continuity we strive for on our websites.”

External images represent about 30% of the retailer’s total, with 10% of those previously being sent offshore for the two-hour processing. The company publishes approximately three million photos a year on its product pages.

With remove.bg, the B2C e-commerce platform brought some of the items back in-house to have their backgrounds removed. Removing backgrounds at a lower cost and including the time savings of eliminating added QA steps was, says the Creative Production Manager, a “win.”

“Our production editors can go through this simple process, saving us all the time of sending and receiving batches of images and all the administrative tasks associated with that process— all of that was cut out!”

remove.bg came into the company through a merger with a recently acquired firm that had been using the service. However, he says he has been looking around and couldn’t find a better solution.

“I’ve been impressed enough not to make any changes. What you are doing is a difficult thing!”

Indeed, the retailer recently upgraded to remove.bg’s enterprise plan for companies that process more than 100,000 images a year. This allows them to save up to 70% in costs, provides a dedicated customer success manager, and grants access to remove.bg’s quality improvement and loyalty plans.

The time savings were hugely significant. Even including the QA process, two hours were reduced to two minutes per image. Costs per image fell by 60% for this process.

Even though removing backgrounds is a small part of the company's image-editing process, the company is keen to be as efficient as possible.

“We’ve been at this for a while, and we're pretty good at it,” the Creative Production Manager says. “We are continuously asking, “What is that next-level thing that we can do to shave off a little bit more time and effort to make tangible gains?’”

The retailer has been so impressed with how remove.bg helps get manufacturers' in-stock items to the market that they are exploring other ways the service might help them save time elsewhere in the company.

“At the end of the day, getting an item to market faster vastly outstrips the cost savings in terms of profitability,” the Creative Production Manager says.

He has found remove.bg’s customer service excellent, and particularly values the way the software provider suggested they would benefit from the enterprise program.

“We know something about great customer service. I was impressed that your team went out of their way to present fresh ideas. That's the best part of customer service; when it's consultative, not just me sitting around trying to think of how I can get something more from your product. They’re actually there proactively thinking about how they can benefit me, and that's great.”