What are the examples of using AI in eCommerce applications?

Ecommerce has shaped our lives in so many ways. However, to become an integral part of our lives, businesses have done a remarkable job. For making any venture successful, especially when it comes to expanding any industry’s limit, it is absolutely necessary that businesses adapt to technological advancements. And eCommerce businesses have nailed it. Specifically discussing artificial intelligence, it has only just begun to unfold. There is so much depth to the technology and endless possibilities. Every industry is using it, and eCommerce has not fallen short in any manner. Businesses are implementing it in multiple ways to offer more personalized experiences to their customers while also reducing the manual intervention in the business processes. Technically, artificial intelligence is not just about optimizing your customer interaction, it is also about making your business more sustainable and scalable. 

With growing competition amongst some of the biggest eCommerce players, it is very likely that we would see some out-of-the-box implementations of artificial intelligence. In the end, it goes without saying that the winner would be the one that adapts to the technology faster and implements these advancements in the most innovative ways. Here are some examples of using AI solutions for business in the eCommerce domain. 

Artificial Intelligence and Ecommerce Industry

Artificial intelligence or AI helps businesses to serve their customers better with minimal manual intervention. Artificial intelligence has empowered businesses to offer their services 24*7 and provide information and resolutions to customer problems faster. Customers are benefited from artificial intelligence in many ways. Today artificial intelligence is able to identify customer needs as per their interaction with the software programs. Relevant product suggestions, personalized experience on the eCommerce site, and also faster query resolution based on their previous interactions is an integral part of the AI implementation process. Furthermore, strategic improvement in business intelligence is built using AI. AI has completely changed how we see and process data and information. We are now building more reliable strategies and faster than ever before in implementation. Though fascinating, this is just scratching the surface, here is how AI will change eCommerce forever. 

A. Personalized Services 

If wetalk about - ecommerce website development services, personalized services are strategically driven technical implementations that allow you to provide tailored customer experiences. It helps you in meeting the individual needs of the customers as per their preferences. Personalization is driven by collecting valuable data from customer activities and behavior and inspiring custom experiences on the product for brand loyalty. 

Personalization involves documenting customer data and interactions with the product at various stages. The information collected is then used to cater personalized experiences to the customers at several levels. It includes interacting with customers through their preferred channels, providing them personalized product recommendations as per their product search or purchase, and also supporting solutions. Here is how you can implement artificial intelligence in custom ecommerce website development for personalization of the customer experience. 

• Website personalization 

Starting with the basics, artificial intelligence can help you personalize the experience on the website. Website personalization requires taking into account behavioral attributes, demographic attributes, and contextual attributes. This helps you in engaging your customers better and increases your retention rate. With website personalization, you can aim at providing them content based on their geolocation in several languages, customize site navigation, notifications, catalogs, product page view, and more.  AI can help you understand customer preferences and implement these changes without having customers or you intervene. 

• Recommendation Systems 

Push notifications and sending product recommendations is one proven marketing tool to bring your customers to your eCommerce websites and applications. An AI-infused website or application can thus strengthen their recommendation games and provide relevant suggestions to the customers. This strategy helps you in driving sales and allows you to engage your customers better. Providing suggestions faster, providing the best price or sale information image the range of things you can do by leveraging customer data and implementing great marketing strategies powered by artificial intelligence. The strategy drives sales, ensures customer satisfaction, improves results from your remarketing campaigns, and more. 

• Personalized search 

Let’s face it, if you are a big eCommerce company you would have thousands of products and there would be some percentage of customers that would be finding it difficult to find certain products. Site search is a valuable tool that helps drive sales for the eCommerce industry. As a business owner, you must ensure that your site is making it a lot easier for customers to find products. This becomes easier if you know what type of customer he or she is and what they might be looking for on your site. Relevant search results can be provided to the customers as per the written queries by customers in the search bar. If not, the lead drops.  

AI-infused search engines help you with this course. They enhance the effectiveness of the search engines and can provide more insightful results to the customers. This is done with the powerful insight engine. An insight engine is a combined tool that uses machine learning and AI to personalize search results. With the power of data, you can provide more personalized and accurate results to your customers. 

• Deep learning tools 

AI application development services aimed at incorporating deep learning capabilities into the eCommerce apps and websites can help you go a step further in providing personalized services to the customers. Deep learning tools such as sentiment analysis, visual search, personalization, and recommendations can enable you as an eCommerce business to efficiently meet the exceeding expectations of your customers and provide a more personalized experience. 

B. Improving Products and Services 

One of the biggest challenges for businesses is to reduce their ad expense and improve the quality of their lead generation. Improving products and services with the implementation of AI applications in ecommerce can help you drive sales without having to spend time and money on the new marketing strategies. Improved product suggestions, reaching potential customers, and improving overall customer experience can be achieved through AI for higher conversion rates. Here is how AI can help you optimize your products and services. 

• Price optimization 

One of the greatest benefits of online businesses is that we are able to capture data at every step of the customer journey. A lot of times customers drop out looking at the price for certain products. Rather than letting go of these leads, you can develop a sale or discount campaign and drive your remarketing campaign to potential customers. Since these customers have already been looking for these products, they are likely to convert and provide you a better ROI. AI thus helps you efficiently utilize the customer data and provide relevant insights to drive these marketing campaigns. 

• Image tagging/ recognition 

One of the coolest examples of image tagging and recognition is Pinterest. The app on signing up asks users to provide their preferences and utilizes that information wholesomely to provide relevant information on the platform. Although it is not an eCommerce site, you can learn a lot from the Pinterest strategy to engage the users through highly intelligent image tagging and recognition software. It identifies the elements of the images and provides close to perfect image suggestions to the customers. In the case of eCommerce, images can be products. People that are searching for products and land on a certain product page can recommend similar products to help them continue their search. It is very important you don’t let the lead drop. 

• Pinterest visual search engine 

Not only is Pinterest a perfect platform to find matching products but the powerful AI engine can provide various relevant suggestions to the people landing on a certain image. This strategy can be used in eCommerce to provide specific recommendations to the customers based on the attributes such as size, color, shape, brand, fabric, product, etc.

• Auto-generated product descriptions 

Product descriptions are one of the most important aspects of the eCommerce website. The more elaborative the description is, and provides useful information about the product, the more likely it is for people to buy those products. Customer purchase decisions are highly based on reading the description of the product, people aren’t mainly going to purchase the product just by seeing the images. It is a significant part of the customer experience. You can say it is one of the most influential aspects for you to convert the customers. 

Creating content for thousands of products is time-consuming and requires a lot of manual labor. The advancement of technology has made it possible today for eCommerce businesses to incorporate AI-driven content generation tools that can do this task in a few hours. Through these AI tools, you can create content for thousands of products without having to do any hard work.

• Conversion rate optimization 

Conversion rate optimization - data not only allows you to identify your potential customers and segment them but also helps you in building crucial strategies to build a successful eCommerce business. Artificial intelligence along with machine learning can help you improve your conversion rate. For example, personalization tools such as Qubit help in A/B testing and multivariate analysis to identify the false positives found in the user actions and convert the leads. 

• Retail analytics 

Ecommerce development includes the integration of high-end dashboards that help you in improving your internal operations. This also includes providing you with data analytics to empower your decisions and build successful business strategies. Analytics is an irreplaceable part of the eCommerce business. 

Sales, customer data, business intelligence, and business operations are all powered by analytics as they provide you with data-backed studies about your business. With the help of AI, machine learning can take a leap into the future and provide enterprises with data to analyze customer behavior, supply chain, inventory management, and target-based marketing. With these insights, eCommerce companies can help you in making improvements in the overall performance of the business and aid your revenue generation. 

• Self Checkout Systems 

One of the biggest tech companies that ventured into digital commerce first was Amazon. However, they have also started to see a big potential in physical retails and have a few AI-powered self-checkout stores where people can come and shop and check out once they are done with the shopping. It is one of the most excruciating shopping experiences as customers have minimum interaction with the store staff, they select their products and checkout themselves using various modes of payment. Big eCommerce players in the industry looking forward to expanding into physical retail can use Amazon Go as a template to empower their customers and also reduce their business expenses through the smart use of advanced technology such as Artificial intelligence. 

C. Website performance optimization 

Although eCommerce applications are very popular, people are fast shifting back to websites as they find it irrelevant to download applications on the phone to make purchases in the gaps of a certain time. Website performance optimization is very important as it sets your impression in front of your customers. Here is how you can utilize AI to optimize your website performance. 

• Forum and Review Moderation

Customer reviews help enforce trust in products. People that have previously bought and experienced products on your website have a lot to share with the world. Customer reviews thus are very important. On the other hand, managing the quality of reviews is challenging yet necessary. People tend to leave fake reviews and this can break customer trust in not just the product and the brand but in the eCommerce site as well. AI can help you in taking down this challenge (popularly known as astroturfing). 

Astroturfing is an informal term used for messages or campaigns that appear natural but are actually being defined by a company to taint their competitor’s image. One of the good examples of bypassing astroturfing comes from Amazon. It uses AI to fight this change and ensures the quality review on their site. It does it by weighing verified customer purchases and promoting those reviews over their site. This double-checking helps the prominence of the reviews and boosts customer confidence in the eCommerce site. 

• Marketplace moderation 

The next challenge for eCommerce sites comes from vendors. Fake products can negatively impact the customer’s perception of your eCommerce site. People expect you to verify every product and vendor on your site and look forward to buying genuine products. 

To fight this challenge you can use AI to spot fake products. A software company named 3 PM marketplace Solutions is helping eCommerce companies such as eBay, Amazon, Walmart, and others through a self-learning algorithm. It helps verify the information provided by merchants and products to help make decision-making simple for eCommerce sites. 

Also, read - Power Up Your Online Business with Custom Ecommerce Development

D. Specific Functions in Business Operations 

As said earlier, AI is not just about making decisions better for the customers and business but also about reducing your workload. Running an eCommerce business big or small requires you to manage multiple things simultaneously and adding more human resources to the team means added responsibilities, process failures, and increased business expenses. To fight these challenges you can utilize AI in the following use case: 

• Customer Service 

You must expect to have impatient customers. With the advancement of technology and more and more customers adapting to the new ways of interacting with brands, you can expect them to try unconventional ways to connect with you regarding their purchases, returns, or general inquiry. And this is not just about customers, even your merchants are looking for faster ways to connect with you and get information as fast as they can. 

AI-driven solutions such as personal assistance, and chatbots can offer real-time answers to your customers without having to involve any person. They are very efficient in understanding customer queries, solving problems, and even taking feedback to generate more data for you to optimize and train your artificial system.

Not only are they very effective in customer service but they can be used for general inquiry on the eCommerce sites. People can use personal assistants to search for products, compare two products, provide relevant information and recommendations, and much more. 

• Supply chain management and inventory planning 

Artificial intelligence has made its way into all sorts of operations, even complex ones. The great thing about AI is that it processes the data much faster and efficiently with minimum inaccuracies. AI-powered demand forecasts, inventory management, and data analytics tools can help you beat the conventional challenges such as that demand vs supply. You can use it to predict the sales hikes or drops and supply irregularities to manage your business better. In short, these tools are there to help you stay in stock for high-demand products and ensure customer satisfaction. 

• Automated warehouses

Inventory management is one thing and managing your warehouse is another. A lot of businesses incur losses in the business because of poor warehouse management. There are multiple ways to implement AI to enhance productivity and limit your losses due to poor management. 

Popular solutions provided by AI for warehouse management include damage detection, predictive maintenance, highly accurate warehouse, and inventory management, and if you are a big eCommerce company also manage your warehouse robots. 

• Marketing and sales operations 

• AI in Marketing: AI in marketing can help you in boosting your brand communication and brand engagement. It works by optimizing brand placement and product placement. It also empowers your decisions for remarketing campaigns and reduces your cost per conversion. Furthermore, it has been found highly effective in neuromarketing, channel optimization, context-aware advertising, and more. Through AI you can personalize your advertising campaigns and make your ads more relevant to the customers more likely to convert. 

• AI in Sales: First things first, AI helps in reducing automotive tasks and promotes productivity. Sales teams feel more empowered when they have relevant data on the customers as they can make decisions much faster and better for customers and solve their problems. Another use of AI in sales is demand forecasting, lead generation and lead conversion, improved outbound marketing, customer experience personalization throughout the sales process, and triggering relevant steps to sales reps for improved customer satisfaction. 

• B2B commerce marketing: B2B marketing is more challenging when it comes to identifying potential customers. It is very crucial that your products are visible to the potential customers and they are provided with relevant information. AI thus helps you in capturing data of the anonymous website visitors and helps your sales and marketing team make better decisions. 

AI in eCommerce is not something new, it is one of the most talked-about topics in the technology domain since 2011. People have been making predictions about how AI is going to take things to the next level for eCommerce players and the winner would be the one that knows what and where and how to implement this advanced technology. 

Hope this blog gives you a clearer picture of the role of artificial intelligence in the eCommerce domain. For more information, feel free to connect with us, our highly efficient consultants would be happy to help you in finding custom solutions to your unique challenges and ensure better business growth.