Artificial Intelligence is already being implemented in eCommerce, offering businesses innovative and smart solutions.
It has brought many benefits to the industry, as it finally made it possible for online stores to meet their particular customers’ needs and expectations, and provide them with a memorable shopping experience, thus leaving them satisfied and likely to return for more.
Here are the six most powerful ways to leverage AI in eCommerce.
1. Make Searches More Relevant
Just like in a brick-and-mortar store, you need to help your customers find the product they want, as quickly as possible. With AI-powered smart searches, e-shops can now step up their game when it comes to this.
Using predictive search, auto-complete options, and spelling corrections, customers can get tens of personalized suggestions for the products – quickly and accurately.
AI enables visual search in eCommerce businesses, too. This way, consumers can discover what they want to purchase, with a single click, just by taking a photo of the desired item on their phone. AI will find similar products based on quality, texture, color or size. Platforms such as ViSenze and Cortexica are among the leading ones when it comes to visual search.
eCommerce businesses can now reach their customers via their home assistants too, such as Apple HomePod, Alexa, or Google Home. According to research, 35% of users have already used their virtual assistants for making a purchase, so optimizing content for voice searches is a must.
A voice assistant on your eCommerce website will make your customers experience more natural, smooth and hassle-free, as they won’t have to type all of the time.
2. Hyper-Personalization
Online shoppers don’t want to waste their time on offers or content that don’t suit them. Studies show that 74% of online customers are frustrated with the content that doesn’t match their needs, while 77% would rather pay more to get personalized customer experience.
With the implementation of AI, and its subsets – machine learning and big data, digital marketers can now produce and deliver the right kind of message to the right segment of their target audience. This way, you can make sure the content and the offers are personalized and tailored to your every individual customer’s particular interests, needs, and desires.
One of the most obvious use cases is product recommendation, based on the users’ behavior on the websites and their past purchases. An AI-powered recommendation engine can help your online store customers by recommending the product that will likely fit their interests, and at the same time, help you win more sales.
3. Chatbots
Chatbots are becoming mainstream in the eCommerce industry – 67% of customers have already used chatbots in 2018 to get a quick and reliable response.
As chatbots are now able to answer 80% of standard questions users ask them and resolve issues quickly, their number and usage will only continue to grow.
The benefits of chatbots in eCommerce are numerous, but here are a few crucial ones:
- 24/7/365 customer support. eCommerce customers expect online shops to be open all the time, and implementing a chatbot to your online store will allow for this. Their needs will be catered to immediately, no matter the time of day, and satisfied with the service offered.
- Your eCommerce store can use chatbots to collect data about your customers in order to personalize product pages based on their needs and online behavior.
- Reduced costs. As chatbots can efficiently cover most of the queries, while reducing the odds for human errors, your eCommerce business can take the stress away from your customer support team and significantly reduce overhead costs.
- Cart recovery. Abandoned shopping carts can be a great resource for increasing e-shop sales, and a whole recovery campaign can easily be handled by a chatbot.
- Product guidance. Chatbots can guide eCommerce customers to the checkout page by helping them find the product they are looking for as well as offering additional help when it comes to purchase-related issues.
Customer service chatbots enhance customer experience and reduce delivery costs. Besides, they can handle many tasks such as appointment scheduling, tracking orders and deliveries, refunds, renewals, applications, etc.
4. Predictive Pricing and Incentives
AI-powered tools can make your pricing and incentives more dynamic. These tools use data science and machine learning to study customers’ behavior, predict it and change the price in real-time.
Some of them take into account competitors’ offers and market demand and make corrections of price within the preset parameters. For example, they can show a higher price to a visitor coming from a high-income region. Amazon has already been using this kind of dynamic pricing model, which means that the prices on the platform change every ten minutes.
To a user who viewed the same product in your online store several times, such an AI-based tool can offer a 15% discount, thus speeding up their purchasing decision, boosting their satisfaction, and increasing your sales.
5. AI-Powered Email Marketing
Email marketing is still very effective in B2C. 49% of customers say that they would like to receive promotional messages from their favorite brands, and by using AI-powered tools, eCommerce can achieve just that.
Furthermore, AI will make use of all the available customer data, and make it possible to segment the target audience based on their relevant traits and deliver personalized content, tailored to the customers’ needs.
AI-powered email automation software can bring many benefits, and some are:
- Even though campaigns are automated, emails can be personalized for a more humane feel.
- More relevant email messages.
- Providing intelligent analysis of customers based on their response to the campaign.
- Real-time change in marketing strategy, based on customers’ feedback.
6. Automated Product Descriptions
A great deal of eCommerce website performance depends on accurate and unique product descriptions. An online store can have great photos of its products, but if the details are not provided, the customer will go to a competitor’s shop.
Still, with a huge inventory of products that an e-commerce business needs to describe properly, the costs can be pretty high. AI can quickly and efficiently solve this problem, as it automates the process by filling the product description with relevant pieces of information, including the most recent and relevant details. AI can also continue to monitor whether these descriptions are effective, and make necessary changes if they are needed.
Artificial intelligence can be just the kick your eCommerce business needs to succeed, so get ready to catch the wave and be an early adopter of new technologies.
