Traditional electronic commerce websites mainly use the key words of commodity to search for goods. However, text information can't describe all the characteristics of the commodity, and can cause subjectivity of human operation. The image retrieval technology based on content provides a new opportunity for the development of electronic commerce website by extracting the visual features of the images. This thesis combs the researches on the shopping technology based on image retrieval, summarizes research status, analyses the principle, and puts forward future trend.