AI in eCommerce: Benefits and Applications

The movement of eCommerce adopting new trends and technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, to increase potential and commercial opportunities was especially during the pandemic, making selling easier for retailers and more enjoyable for shoppers. Artificial intelligence and algorithmic technologies can be extremely beneficial in increasing sales, enhancing digital marketing strategy and optimizing many areas of eCommerce. Let’s take a look at the advantages of these technologies and how to incorporate them into your business.

Offering a personalized experience to each customer

According to surveys, 45% of shoppers prefer to purchase on eCommerce websites providing personalized recommendations, while 56% prefer to buy more products from the same store. This is where artificial intelligence comes into play. It can process massive amounts of data more efficiently than humans. As a result, retailers can acquire analytics of data patterns such as purchasing history, customer behaviour, and so on. The data will then be divided into groups with comparable patterns to deliver the relevant deals to each group of clients. Hence, your customers will enjoy having a personalized experience and are more likely to spend more time per visit.

Retargeting qualified prospects

Since artificial intelligence collects data and customer behaviour, it is not surprising that AI can predict future shopping behaviour with greater accuracy. You can detect predictions through a variety of methods and channels such as mobile phones, recognizing faces through CCTV cameras, or analyzing demand through Dwell Time (the amount of time a user spends on a specific site and the number of clicks on a search result to a webpage). This is useful in selling products that meet the customers’ needs and far more effective than manually sales professionals follow-up.

Making the purchase process more efficient

Retailers can also integrate artificial intelligence into their CRM for advertising purposes. For example, when customers ask for further information about a product, the artificial intelligence system can automatically generate accurate information and respond to customers. This process may include customers’ voice research or visual queries. You can integrate augmented Reality and Virtual Reality into your eCommerce platforms to let customers try products virtually.

Pricing adjustments

As the online retail industry is rapidly growing, online marketplaces have become unexpectedly competitive, particularly when it comes to pricing. The artificial intelligence system can compare the prices of your store’s products to those of online competitors. By seeing how customers are comparing prices from multiple stores, you can offer special discounts to differentiate from others.

Data management automation

Another interesting fact is that artificial intelligence can develop content from Big Data for product classification. Indeed, when you add a product, the machine will categorize it based on what it has learned. This process reduces manually inputting jobs, making it easier for customers to find the most suitable products. However, given artificial intelligence’s ability to learn from data, the machine needs a large enough example database to learn and become more and more accurate.

Less fraud, more accurate results

When it comes to purchasing decisions, product reviews are one of the most influential factors. Furthermore, the number of bad and fraudulent reviews is growing, and several of them can easily undermine the reputation of your eCommerce. The good news is that today’s artificial intelligence can learn the nature of such frauds’ anomaly. In this event, stores will be notified, to deal with them on time.

Integrating artificial intelligence to assist in managing information about products, services and responding to customer needs, helps to develop sales on eCommerce platforms. However, this is barely enough. According to research, the majority of customers seek human interaction as they used to have in a physical store before the pandemic.

The need for the human touch

Chatbots and Live-Shopping are a great help in this case. Originally, chatbots sent automated responses from keyword capture. Nonetheless, this system has now evolved to have a more natural conversation with customers thanks to the artificial intelligence engine. With more and more information from the questions submitted, it becomes more feasible to generate specific answers.

However, human control of customer service is still required as many customers prefer face-to-face human engagement. eCommerce can certainly employ chatbots in conjunction with a back-end system staffed by real people; but it is not the most convenient approach to serve customers. As a result, live-shopping solutions are growing increasingly popular. Of course, it would be exhausting if eCommerce provided 24 hours with a day of client service. Nonetheless, through correct promotion on multiple internet platforms, you can drive your customers to gather at a specified time to watch your live event.