Artificial Intelligence is everywhere. Isn’t it? Over the last couple of years, we have seen a dramatic increase in the use of AI. From independent contractors and employees to marketers and large companies, everyone is trying hard to wrap their heads around this ongoing tech revolution. AI in e-commerce isn’t an exception when it comes to navigating business growth in 2023 and beyond.
AI technologies are making it easier than ever before for companies to create personalized experiences that make customers feel valued and appreciated. From automated product recommendations to intelligent chatbots, AI-driven tools help retailers provide shoppers with more relevant products and services while providing valuable insights into user behavior.
As the world continues to adopt automation and AI, you must consider using these technologies to create an autonomous, self-sustaining business environment where your growth is fueled by AI tools.
But what exactly does AI have to offer when it comes to e-commerce? To answer this question, we’re going to identify 10 ways you can use AI to take your e-commerce business to the next level.
10 Ways To Make The Most Of AI In E-commerce
Shopping in the digital age is no longer just a means to an end – it’s been transformed into an experience. AI-powered e-commerce has revolutionized how we browse, shop and pay for products online. It’s like having a virtual assistant that can help you find what you need with ease. Take a look at these 10 ways artificial intelligence can help you with your e-commerce challenges:
E-commerce chatbots
Imagine a world where customer service is delivered in the blink of an eye, and shoppers are able to get the answers they need quickly. That’s the power of AI-driven e-commerce chatbots – like ChatGPT that can provide customers with personalized shopping experiences powered by machine learning algorithms.
So, the first thing you can do is integrate a powerful AI chatbot with your website. This way, you can leverage natural language processing (NLP) and sophisticated machine learning models to enable automated customer support on demand.
This sets up everything from more accurate product recommendations to better customer segmentation and improved FAQ resolution times.
What’s even more exciting is the potential of combining AI technologies – such as computer vision and deep neural networks – with existing machine learning in e-commerce platforms to create smarter digital stores capable of engaging customers through interactive interfaces.
According to Gartner, within 5 years more than 25% of companies will be using chatbots as their primary customer service tools. Another study found that 88% of users had at least one interaction with a chatbot in 2022.
Since AI chatbots are going to be an integral part of customer support, it’s high time for you to integrate an advanced chatbot tool into your e-commerce store. Here is what today’s it can do for your business:
- Provide 24/7 customer support
- Improve response time to customer inquiries
- Reduce costs associated with hiring and training CS representatives
- Help customers navigate products and make purchases
- Collect data on customer preferences and behavior to improve marketing strategies
- Handle transactions and payments within the chat interface
- Allow businesses to reach customers on multiple platforms and channels
- Analyze customer feedback to improve the overall customer experience.
Related: How To Build A ChatGPT Chatbot For Your Website In Minutes
Sales Funnel Optimization
Let’s talk about another application of AI in e-commerce. If you’re running an e-commerce business, you’re likely to be aware of the different stages of a sales funnel. The question is how artificial intelligence can help you optimize your sales funnel. Here is how AI can do all the heavy lifting for you:
Find Out Where Your Prospects Are In The Sales Funnel
When it comes to sales funnels, you’re never quite sure what your potential customers are thinking or feeling. It can be frustrating to interpret their online behavior or determine their level of interest in your product.
However, with the power of AI, you can unlock the hidden meaning behind your customers’ actions. AI tools can sift through mountains of data, from social media to website analytics, to pinpoint exactly where each prospect stands in the sales funnel.
Imagine being able to read your customer’s minds, to know exactly what they need to hear and when they need to hear it. With AI, it’s possible. You can deliver personalized content, tailored to each customer’s unique journey, increasing the chances of a conversion.
Optimize For Urgency And Loyalty
AI can adapt in real-time when presenting offers, adjusting the terms of the offer based on the user. For example, a percentage discount might work well for one customer, while a limited-time promotion might be more effective for another.
Artificial intelligence also eliminates the need for manual A/B testing, allowing you to achieve optimized outcomes without the hassle of experimentation. You can optimize coupons, promotions, and advertising campaigns to reach customers at the right time with the right product.
AI algorithms excel at identifying correlations, which means that they can recommend a cup of coffee to a commuter waiting in traffic or snow based on weather and traffic data.
Another way that AI can make things easier for you is by monitoring current clients or accounts to detect when action is necessary. For instance, you can scan social media feeds and news stories to identify emerging issues or events that they need to be aware of.
Price Optimization
You have to analyze vast amounts of data: market trends, customer behavior, and competitor pricing in order to develop the perfect pricing strategy for your online store. This isn’t an easy job. Is it? Now it is a pretty simple and easy job if you know how to use AI in e-commerce.
Did you know that 60% of shoppers choose retailers with optimal prices? Artificial intelligence surely has the potential to help you optimize prices to meet the demands of customers while also maximizing your profit margins. By employing AI, pricing managers can focus on strategic tasks that lead to incremental profits.
According to IBM, a significant number of retailers, about 73%, are planning to leverage intelligent automation to enhance their pricing and promotions by 2021.
Optimal Pricing With AI
Optimal prices are those that do not annoy customers, improve your profit margins, and do not negatively affect the sales of other products in your portfolio. Setting optimal prices for thousands of products on a weekly or even daily basis requires extraordinary analytical and computational abilities, which can be achieved through AI.
Retailers who use AI for price optimization usually go through several stages, starting with SKU pricing, then expanding to product portfolios, channels, points of sale, and, finally, customer pricing. Optimal pricing at every level subsequently improves profitability. From experience, price optimization can increase revenue and sales by up to 9% and 24.7%, respectively.
For e-commerce price optimization, check out tools like Sniffie or Intelligence Node!
Benefits of AI for Price Optimization
The self-learning algorithms used in AI can analyze vast amounts of data and suggest the most relevant price at any given time. These algorithms also consider thousands of hidden relationships between products in a portfolio to recommend individual prices that maximize revenue and sales of the entire product portfolio.
By using AI to automate time- and labor-consuming tasks, you can allow your team to focus on customer-centric decision-making.
Personalized Customer Experience
Consumers like to have highly personalized online experiences. In fact, 88% of people like to buy from a store that provides custom experiences.
Having said that, you probably do a lot to offer personalized shopping experiences to your prospects and customers. However, creating personalized digital experiences isn’t a walk in the park if you don’t have technology at your side. One of the most effective ways to enhance customer experiences is by meeting their expectations and providing them with their preferred products and brands, in the right location and at the right time. This is where you need AI to make your life easier.
By leveraging AI, you can utilize customer search data, browsing history, social media interactions, physical store visits, and other sources of information to gain insights and anticipate your customer needs. Whether you run an online or brick-and-mortar store, you can track stock availability and curate product collections that provide efficient shopping experiences.
Some brands have implemented innovative retail store concepts. Amazon, for example, has introduced the Amazon 4-star retail store which offers products with a multitude of 4-star ratings. The company uses its product recommendation engine to identify trending and popular products to feature in this physical store. This strategy allows Amazon to quickly deliver what customers already want.
Other retailers have adopted a showroom-only concept that uses AI-gathered data for personalized targeting and showcases bestselling or popular products in physical stores for customers to try. This approach not only simplifies the shopping experience but also reduces product returns and saves companies from investing in full-fledged retail stores.
Here are some aspects of your retail shop that can be improved with AI:
- Tailored recommendations
- Customer support
- Customer segmentation
- Voice recognition and natural language processing
- Predictive Analytics
Companies such as SmartCart have developed shopping carts with cameras that can automatically tally up user purchases, prepare an order, and enable payments through a mobile device.
Amazon Go also offers a similar shopping experience for groceries, staples, and meals, where customers can pick up items from the store and ‘just-walk-out,’ with the order charged to their Amazon account.
By anticipating customer needs and preferences and using innovative technologies, you can also enhance your customers’ shopping experiences and boost your business’s success. Consider using tools like ActiveCampaign that you can integrate with ChatGPT to uplevel customer experiences.
Inventory management
Inventory management is often likened to a game of chess where every move must be thought out and strategically planned. AI can easily beat human capabilities when it comes to evaluating data quickly and devising a strategy.
One more application of AI in e-commerce is inventory management. Before we talk about this, let’s take a quick look at how companies use it to optimize their inventory.
Modern commerce organizations are now leveraging real-time perpetual inventory management systems that work seamlessly across both online and in-store transactions. By doing so, they’re able to avoid losing sales due to out-of-stock items, minimize non-value-adding inventory, and reduce the amount of working capital tied up in inventory. This approach also helps to decrease the shrinkage and spoilage of inventory.
On the other hand, many older inventory management systems still rely on outdated demand forecasting algorithms that are not channel-specific and lack the ability to comprehend online shopping patterns. These algorithms are biased towards in-store sales and often result in inaccurate predictions for digital channels.
How AI Enables Inventory Management Optimization
With artificial intelligence (AI) in inventory management, businesses can make better predictions and improve response times by analyzing real-time data. This data can come from various sources, including internal and external factors such as customer feedback, demographics, weather, and social media.
The advantages of using AI algorithms for inventory management are numerous. They allow for continuous monitoring of factors like quantity, cycle times, lead times, temperatures, errors, and planned downtime. By delegating these tasks to AI, your staff can focus on more important responsibilities while reducing the risk of errors associated with repetitive work.
Related: 3 ways AI can help solve inventory management challenges
Data Analytics
AI is probably the latest technology being applied to the data analytics field. If we talk about the challenges e-commerce businesses face when dealing with data analytics, here is what comes to mind:
- Data collection
- Data quality
- Integration of data
- Data security
- Most importantly, the interpretation of data
Now, a relevant AI-driven tool can help you streamline these processes with ease and speed. This software has the ability to analyze data from various sources and provide valuable insights. This includes analyzing customer data, which can be used to influence product development, improve team performance, and make data-driven decisions.
Unlike traditional software, AI-guided systems can automatically clean, analyze, explain, and visualize data without the need for constant human input.
Wondering how it works? Artificial intelligence itself is a field of data science that uses advanced algorithms to enable computers to learn independently. By using machine learning algorithms and tagged samples of text, AI can learn from training data and provide fine-grained insights that humans may miss.
One significant benefit of AI in data analysis is its ability to process large volumes of data quickly and efficiently. It can forecast data trends and provide predictions about consumer preferences, product development, and marketing channels.
Also, AI-based data analysis can go beyond simple diagnostic analyses and tackle qualitative data for diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive analyses. This makes AI-powered systems useful in finding out why something may or may not have worked.
Related: Data analytics & artificial intelligence: What it means for your business and society
Product Recommendations
Did you know 35% of Amazon’s revenue is generated by its recommendation engine? Isn’t it amazing how smart product recommendation tools can help ecommerce companies boost their revenue? Talking about AI in e-commerce, we can’t skip how AI can make your e-commerce product recommendations more efficient and profitable.
E-commerce businesses are increasingly using AI-powered recommendation systems to provide personalized product recommendations to their customers. These systems use complex algorithms to analyze customer data, including past purchases, browsing behavior, and search queries, to make tailored recommendations.
The recommendation system continuously learns and evolves, improving its recommendations over time as it gains more insights into a customer’s preferences and interests. By providing your customers with personalized recommendations, the system can help them discover new products that they may be interested in and save time searching for items to purchase.
The AI-based recommendation system uses various data sources to identify patterns and trends and generate personalized recommendations for each user. These data sources can include user data, item data, and social media data. To analyze this data, the system uses methods such as collaborative filtering and content-based filtering.
One of the benefits of AI-powered recommendation systems is that they can help you increase sales by cross-selling and upselling products to customers. Not to mention, you can improve customer satisfaction and loyalty by providing personalized recommendations.
However, make sure to choose the right product recommendation system for your online store. Amazon Personalize is one of the options you can consider, but be sure to explore more tools. Dynamic Yield and Apptus are also popular product recommendation tools.
Decision Making
Decision-making is another application of AI in ecommerce. We have already mentioned 7 ways an AI-based platform can help you make critical business decisions. From product recommendations to data analytics, AI can make things so much easier for ecommerce business owners.
We have already seen how AI is taking over business decision-making processes. Humans can solve complex problems and make the right decisions. However, AI clearly beats us when it comes to gathering and analyzing big data and making decisions based on those insights with speed and accuracy.
For example, your ecommerce store is vulnerable to fraud, and it’s a challenging task to identify and prevent those activities. This is where an AI-based fraud detection system can make the right decisions at the right time by detecting suspicious activities or analyzing transaction data.
To give you one more example, let’s say you’re planning to launch a new product in a new market. Your first marketing campaign involves making numerous decisions, prioritizing, optimizing, researching, forecasting, and experimenting – a complex undertaking indeed!
This is where AI comes in and helps you collect and analyze vast amounts of data from multiple sources, enabling an interdisciplinary study. It will make it super easy to optimize everything from product development stages to digital marketing strategies for product promotion. For instance, if you want to audit your website content and come up with a better content strategy, AI-based platforms like MarketMuse will do all the hard work for you.
Marketing Forecasting
How do you determine whether or not your marketing efforts would be successful? After all, you want to spend your time and money wisely. Marketing forecasting is a technique that helps marketers predict the potential outcome of their strategies.
If you’re running marketing campaigns, you understand how much time it requires to plan, budget, schedule, and execute a marketing campaign using personalized messages. On the bright side, AI-based tools can take care of these processes.
For example, let’s say you’re about to launch a new product line. Now AI can help you analyze data from past sales and customer behavior. AI may discover that customers who purchased a similar product in the past also like to buy certain complimentary products.
Now, you can use this information to create targeted marketing campaigns that promote the new product line to customers who are most likely to be interested. You can personalize the marketing messages based on the customers’ past purchase history and browsing behavior.
Once you launch the product, AI then monitors the performance in real time, tracking metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and revenue generated. Based on this data, AI can make adjustments to the campaigns on the fly, optimizing them for better performance.
Remarketing
AI has the potential to supercharge your remarketing strategy. While remarketing is a powerful marketing technique, traditional segmentation marketing has some limitations, including the challenge of connecting the right product with the right person.
It becomes even more difficult when trying to match interests and groups with true needs, especially after shoppers log out. Campaigns often rely on experimentation to determine what works, which can be costly and time-consuming.
Thankfully, AI can assist with user segmentation and optimize remarketing strategies. Machine learning algorithms can analyze a vast amount of user data, including purchase history and browsing behavior, to identify patterns that help predict future purchase behavior.
For example, Appier’s CrossX Programmatic Platform uses deep learning algorithms to analyze dozens of user behaviors in real time, identifying which users have a higher likelihood of converting. Marketers can then prioritize retargeting those valuable users.
With AI, you can refine your marketing strategies, personalize your messaging, and target the right audience with greater precision. This not only saves time and resources but also helps you generate better ROI from marketing spend.
Wrapping Up
If you haven’t added artificial intelligence to your e-commerce toolkit, now is the time to take advantage of the AI revolution and reimagine your e-commerce business. From customer support and product recommendations to remarketing and data analytics, AI can streamline most of your business processes. Opportunities are truly endless when it comes to artificial intelligence and e-commerce. The future of AI in e-commerce is bright and this is your opportunity to emerge as a rapidly growing retailer brand!
