AI, a technology that’s no more just a buzzword but gradually becoming a necessity in most sectors. Gone are the days when the transformation from brick and mortar store to an online eCommerce store was considered a drastic change in the business model. Especially with the eCommerce industry gaining enormous success, it is even more critical for the store owners to offer a personalized experience to stay ahead of the competition. AI in eCommerce can be called the flavor of the year. AI brings unprecedented changes to the retail and eCommerce marketing industry.
A recent study conducted by Google showed that people were 40% more likely to exceed their budgets if they felt their shopping experience was more personalized.
Even though many eCommerce platforms offer the tools required to build great stores, very few of them can help you with technology that can provide a fully personalized shopping experience on the online store. With the competition rising, it is high time for store owners to adopt the latest technologies and leverage the power of Artificial Intelligence. The combination of AI and eCommerce brings numerous possibilities to the table.
Let’s begin with one more statistic to encourage the store owners to implement AI to the eCommerce store.
A research by Accenture mentioned that AI could potentially boost profitability rates by an average of 38% across 16 industries by 2035.
Particularly talking about the retail sector, as it brings immediate impact on the two fundamental areas. i.e., personalized shopping experience and making intelligent business decisions. The best part about AI is that it helps eCommerce platforms cater to the users’ needs and interests.
Personalization – Knowing the Name of your Customer isn’t Enough
You may have the best marketing and outreach process, but if the customer doesn’t get the personalized feel after landing on your store, it’s all in vain. The more personalized experience you offer, the better. With AI, it’s easy to get enough data to provide better personalization to the customers.
When you implement Artificial Intelligence on your store, advanced personalization functionalities can be easily offered on your store.
For instance, AI-based product recommendations will always encourage customers to purchase more. Retailers can use Big Data to discover the trends in shopping habits and later use the analysis to offer personalized product recommendations.
With the use of this technology, not only does showcasing personalized products get better, but it also helps in assessing customer behavior. It also offers sophisticated predictions about what a customer wants. This can be used to predict future purchases and hence design the sales strategy based on customer-behavior trends.
Another factor for advanced personalization can be semantic-based search. When having personalization and eCommerce in one statement, there’s nothing more intelligent than offering a thoughtful customer engagement at every point on the store. The search result can be one of the most critical aspects of customer engagement. With the help of advanced semantic-based site search, you can let customers easily navigate the store and find relevant products seamlessly. AI is now able to understand natural language and interpret human semantics, generating an appropriate result.
Chatbots/Virtual Assistants
I guess all customer support problems have just one solution – a well-equipped chatbot. Modern chatbots are developed to interact with customer databases, extract customer details, and respond to them in the most personalized way in real-time. To make it even better, there come virtual shopping assistants, the ones responsible for creating an efficient sales process. The role of assistants is to communicate with customers, curate their preferences, and make the overall shopping experience enjoyable.
Efficient Decision Making
Artificial Intelligence is no more science fiction or any rocket science that every company just aims at. It is a platform developed enough to integrate directly within various aspects of the eCommerce operations. From pricing to assortment management, Big Data helps retailers make informed decisions based on the insights offered by AI tools.
For instance, using complex learning algorithms, AI can help make pricing products a lot more than just guesswork. Optimal pricing can help businesses stay relevant and succeed in a competitive environment. AI also allows efficient inventory and assortment management by effectively and rapidly analyzing a large number of data and generating actionable insights.
Using all the data, store owners can also determine the kinds of products and business actions that reduced efficiency or improved performance and check if anything requires readjustments. These are the decisions that play a significant role in market share, pricing patterns, and the overall progress of the business. Thanks to the efficient analysis of big data, informed decisions can be made quickly and easily.
While there are ample ways this technology can make your life and eCommerce store owner easier and simpler, along with an ecstatic shopping experience on the store, we’ll cover the next ones in our future articles. If you’re planning to implement AI on your store, feel free to reach out. Our Magento experts would be happy to help.
