Technology is a fluid arena and it is enabling businesses regardless of the industry or geographical location to switch to an online mode of operations for better opportunities. ECommerce is not an exception. Business leaders, as well as small stores, are equally leveraging technology to reach new customers and augment ROI.
However, changing paradigms of success demand various changes. While businesses focused more on bringing their stores online once with web development, today, the demand is to garner valuable customer insights and optimize revenue while ensuring customer delight. Not only this, customer demands are rapidly changing and businesses must adapt to these in order to stay competitive.
AI has been a major enabler of this change and helping businesses make the best of their investment in digital transformation, helping eCommerce stores emerge stronger than ever. Let’s talk about the significant benefits that AI brings for eCommerce businesses.
Artificial Intelligence in eCommerce: Top Benefits and Use Cases
1. Advanced Visual Search
55% of the eCommerce customers accept that visual search influences their style and taste.
No wonder AI-powered visual searches are among the top must-have features for any eCommerce portals. Visual search engines allow consumers to upload a picture of an item they are looking for to find accurate products on the eCommerce website.
Algorithms working in the background identify the product in the image and brings all the possible option at the user’s fingertips. Besides helping customers to find their preferred products in a few clicks, it also enables eCommerce businesses to close more deals in lesser time as well as boost the customer experience.
2. Personalized Recommendations
Ever checked, “The T-Shirt you just bought goes best with these”, and bought a new pair of trousers?
That’s exactly what we know as a personalized recommendation.
Personalization has been driving sales and customer delight in a majority of business verticals and as we know, eCommerce is not an exception. Studies suggest that:
- eCommerce businesses using personalized experiences as a part of their marketing strategy observe an increase of 20% in sales.
- 80% of the buyers are more likely to buy from brands that offer personalized experiences.
- 44% of the consumers agree that if offered with personalized services, they are more likely to buy again from a business.
- 77% of the buyers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that offered personalized experience
Integrating AI-based personalized recommendation engines into your eCommerce portals helps you engage customers that ultimately give a positive spin to your company’s bottom line.
3. Voice Assistance
It is a well-known fact that consumer habits are changing. People look for answers instantly and to enable that, tech giants have come up with the most innovative search methods. Voice search is one such example. It uses the person’s speech to look for answers to certain questions or command applications to do a certain task.
With always-on-the-move consumers of today, voice search is emerging as one of the most favored methods of exploring the web for desirable results. On an eCommerce website, it does not just reduce the time spent looking for desired results but also reduces time and exertion on users.
Thanks to this, now consumers only have to call out, “Alexa, find me a new pair of black shoes”, and they have all the tedious tasks handled.
4. Automated Product Description
Once you have set up your eCommerce store, you have multiple aspects to be managed. One of such tasks is managing over 100s of 1000s of products, and ensuring your site ranks among top searches when someone looks for those products. Challenging, isn’t it? Writing descriptions for these many products is not only demanding in terms of time and resources, but even a single mistake in a few can cause huge losses by increasing investments in both these.
This is precisely where automated product descriptions come in. Having AI-powered product description generators is like hiring a huge army of content writers whose deliverables are close to perfect. These are NLP based solutions that analyze a product and generate the best description to go with while enabling some striking benefits such as:
- Cost savings with operational efficiency
- Seamless content management
- Accurate tone of voice that delivers message right
- Address multiple buyer personas with personalization they need
- SEO-oriented descriptions that brings results on search engines
5. Smart Searches
Average human attention span is decreasing, and when you have only 7 seconds to make an impact, it is not wise to throw irrelevant search results onto your customers. Not sure about the future purchases, but definitely you wreak havoc on the current one.
Smart searches can help you here. Although often overlooked, smart searches can boost the efficiency of traditional search boxes to improve customer experience, while drawing important insights from:
- Navigation analysis
- Related issues
- Synonyms for searched terms
- Phenetic similarity between words and letters
Once done, it delivers the right results to the consumers even if there are misspelt words, making search engines more powerful.
6. Warehouse Automation
An automated warehouse management system helps warehousing teams boost their efficiency with AI and robotics. Combined with other software, automated warehouses systems bring key insights into inventory and help make informed decisions.
Practical implementation of warehouse automation systems helps cut down on the manual efforts that slow down the speed of delivery. At the same time, they enable real-time visibility of the inventory and decrease the likelihood of errors.
7. Robust Security
ECommerce consumers transact on websites every day. At the same time, there is a lot of personal information saved on these systems that need robust security. If compromised, a single breach can cost huge financial investment and most importantly, business reputation.
AI-based fraud detection systems can help you keep all these at bay.
8. Dynamic Pricing
Dynamic pricing or price optimization allows eCommerce businesses to leverage market demands to boost their profits. The pricing of the item can vary according to the customer demands as well as on the basis of competitor’s pricing, supply, conversions, sales goals, etc.
Enabled by machine learning algorithms, eCommerce businesses can automate pricing decisions to offer benefits such as:
- Greater control on the pricing strategy
- Grow revenue
- Precise, SKU-level pricing
- Long-term increase in sales while considering factors like customer’s priceperception
9. e-Mail Marketing
Online marketers consider AI as the future, thanks to a wide range of benefits that paves the way to optimize the CTR and save on time and financial investment. By backing email marketing efforts with AI, eCommerce businesses can improve their programs in the following ways:
- Know the best time to send emails: This enables them to know when their subscribers are more likely to open, read, or click a message. Therefore, they can send an email at the right time for improved outcomes.
- A/B Tests: If your subject line is not intriguing enough to the readers, your emails are more likely to end up among the unopened ones and soon among the Spams. By using AI/ ML systems, you can apply A/B tests to discover which subject line and content resonates the best with your target audience, thereby bringing the best results.
The Bottom-Line
It is a no-brainer that artificial intelligence has the ability to give a positive spin to most of the business aspects, helping them thrive in the competitive digital arena. Whether you are one of the businesses still on the fence about AI implementation or someone who is among the early adopters, one thing that you would agree with is- AI is the future of business. The ones who have realized the power of AI are the ones leading the industries tomorrow. Agree or disagree? Drop us a line and share your thoughts.
About Author: Nainika is the Senior Technical Content Writer at Matellio who has a love and passion for covering various aspects of next-gen technology. She enjoys implementing various writing styles and techniques. She is an engineer which further gives him a broad spectrum of understanding various tech tools and platforms.
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