It’s time to start using AI in the eCommerce segment of the retail industry. Read on how AI is changing the way online stores operate and provide services to their customers.
Artificial Intelligence has progressed to the point where it has become an essential component of the eCommerce industry. Considering this advancing trend, many eCommerce businesses have begun to use different forms of artificial intelligence for understanding their customers’ buying behavior, offering relevant products at the right time, and identifying competitors’ strategies by enabling AI reliable analytics.
To add to that, competition across global eCommerce markets is at an all-time high. While eCommerce companies are standing up to these market challenges, AI brings the best results in business operations.
E-commerce businesses around the world are using AI to accomplish tedious tasks so they can channel their efforts towards more intelligent work. From Alexa to Google’s home devices & chatbots artificial intelligence has already been a part of our lives. Likewise, AI in eCommerce has improved the entire experience of online buying & selling and adding a personal touch to the customer experience. Companies like Amazon and Flipkart have already revolutionized their traditional practices to bring the best results in their businesses.
But how are they doing this? In this article, we will see various applications of artificial intelligence in eCommerce.
Personalization of Online Purchases
Artificial intelligence in eCommerce offers personalized and interactive buying experiences. With AI-enabled systems, companies can view their customers’ preferences in real-time and provide them with reliable and specialized shopping experiences.
AI can deliver suitable product suggestions according to the preferences of the user. AI can play a big role in identifying customer behavior through personalization and, by analyzing clicks, shopping carts, purchasing history, and search queries. All these can help eCommerce brands to deliver suitable suggestions for additional purchases that make sense in the eyes of the user.
Warehouse Automation
AI in eCommerce is also transforming warehouse management for small businesses. AI-powered solutions help to streamline product pick-and-pack processes without taking lunch breaks. AI robots can work 24/7. Employing AI solutions in the warehouse can result in a reduction of errors as AI robots understand their placement and thus can place and retrieve them when required.
Warehouses can also use technologies such as IoT and AR/VR, that work in tandem with AI to improve the accuracy in warehouse operations. AI robots can monitor warehouse operations as well. And they can identify and assess the risk score of activities in the warehouse by analyzing them. The robots can also take over the high-risk tasks, and thus is beneficial for improving the safety of employees at the warehouse.
Visual Search
AI-enabled visual search is the ability to use an image to search for identical or similar visual images. A product picture is worth a thousand words, visual product searchability can undoubtedly solve the issue of inaccurate search queries.
When purchasing online a customer should have a simple search process but in many cases the journey from ‘searching’ to ‘seeing’ a product is a path filled with hassles that often leads to no-purchase at all. AI-enabled visual search eases the way consumers see a product. AI in eCommerce has improved the visual search capabilities and helps in finding products that match close to your search.
AI Chatbots Another popular example of AI in eCommerce is Chatbot. These are systems that interact either through text or voice interface. With AI chatbots in eCommerce, consumers can speak to a device rather than typing on a keyboard. Some of the best examples of AI chatbots are Facebook Messenger and Slack. They can adapt to any language and respond depending on the region.
AI chatbots can benefit eCommerce businesses especially those who receive international requests in a multitude of languages. The chatbots understand the dialect and languages including past behavior of a user and customer chat statistics to provide the best possible solution. Popular eCommerce websites such as Amazon and eBay have implemented AI chatbot applications to deliver convenient order placing and customer service experience to the users.
Superior User Experience
With AI in eCommerce, certain advanced systems are being used by companies such as facial recognition, recommendation engine, and voice interfaces. These systems help in understanding customer behavior when buying a particular product or service. The AI-enabled programs assist eCommerce in creating a better user experience for different circumstances. If you’re not already using these AI eCommerce systems, you should begin experimenting with a few and watch the results.
eCommerce Catalog Management
Nowadays retailers need to create a convenient and user-friendly process of online shopping to satisfy the needs of shoppers. So, it’s important for online retailers to have good catalog management for a better user experience. An online eCommerce catalog provides product names, descriptions, prices, supplier details, and other related information. Within those thousands of product categories, small details like color, texture, pattern, style, sleeve, length, bottom type, and fit need to be accurately mentioned in the catalog to help customers get the right product information.
The use of AI in eCommerce catalogs can now help in obtaining accurate and consistent data for getting deeper catalog insights. Similarly, automated product tagging by AI improves business operation efficiency and gives retailers the ability to track or tag manually. Automated product tagging tailored by AI increases business operation efficiency and ensures a better shopping experience.
For example, a catalog can have 10,000 products in different colors, shapes, sizes, and they all need to be tagged correctly. AI-enabled automatic tagging organizes and tags the product catalog based on their characteristics. This is the reason why a lot of eCommerce companies have adopted this technology, making it an essential part of their online selling strategy.
Automated Pricing Management
Apart from managing catalogs, inventory, and taking care of customer purchase preferences, as an online retailer, you must also know the best price for your products. Thanks to AI, eCommerce companies are able to provide them with the smallest detail possible that helps them to improve their business operations.
In a nutshell, with AI in eCommerce pricing, you have analytics software for price analysis that uses a certain statistical model, machine learning, and a number of other AI models to create algorithms that automatically identify pricing patterns from the data and predict prices based on that information.
Automated AI pricing solutions in eCommerce can help reduce the manual work regarding tracking the prices of your competition. This way, businesses have the ability to determine product prices based on data from both internal and external sources.
Takeaways
In this post, we’ve looked at how businesses can use artificial intelligence in eCommerce to increase overall profit margins.
Today, the use of artificial intelligence in eCommerce is booming and more and more businesses are adapting to this trend. In such a competitive scenario, AI in eCommerce really plays an important role in creating personalized experiences. For competing with top eCommerce giants like Amazon and Flipkart, businesses should adopt AI in eCommerce business processes as soon as possible.
