5 Ways to Integrate AI in Your eCommerce Shop
The still-ongoing pandemic has pushed many people towards online shopping permanently. And this gave a staggering rise to the ecommerce industry. During the pandemic, there has been a 50% growth in the ecommerce market.
And, as more and more people opt for ecommerce businesses over conventional retail, it is becoming important to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) for efficiency. Taking such a step can prove beneficial for many reasons; driving customer engagement, detecting fraud, retaining customers, and enhancing the shopping experience.
Big players are already deploying AI, and here are five ways you can start leveraging it to grow your ecommerce business.
1. Chatbots
Instead of having a dedicated customer support team, you can implement AI-powered chatbots on your ecommerce website. When customers interact with the chatbox, it becomes difficult to tell the difference between a real person and a robot with AI. You can integrate a chatbot that helps drive customized, branded, and intelligent communications.
AI comes with machine learning to provide your ecommerce business with 24/7 customer service. You can instantly gather vital customer data, monitor behavior, and achieve seamless cart checkouts with chatbot-guided shopping. Automated chatbots allow your ecommerce site to improve conversion rates by personalizing customer experience without any additional effort.
The best way to gauge whether your bot is genuinely benefitting your customers and boosting sales will need you to evaluate its activities using chatbot analytics. This data contains a simple approach to measuring the effectiveness of your bot. Here, you need to focus on metrics like customer engagement, bot’s helpfulness, retention rates, and sophisticated analytics to track sales conversions.
You can gather the bot data in two ways; either by using its analytics capabilities that come with some bot-building platforms or hook your bot to an independent bot analytics platform.
2. Inventory Management
Your ecommerce business will need effective inventory management to have the correct amount of stock on hand. This should be such to meet market demand while avoiding the accumulation of unsold or outdated inventory.
Such an approach will demand redefining your ecommerce business’ approach towards inventory management by bringing in necessary change and understanding what is change management. So, this could lead to changes in multiple departments in terms of changes in the workers’ responsibilities, setting up a dedicated team, onboarding new tools and resources, etc.
AI-enabled inventory management allows you to maintain the stock levels based on data from a variety of criteria, including;
- Current stock levels
- Past years’ sales trends
- Anticipating the changes in product demands
- Checking for Possible supply-related problems that can impact inventory levels
3. Visual Search
You can feel the real power of integrating AI in your ecommerce shop when it enhances UX. One way to help users find exactly what they are looking for is through images. Think of Pinterest’s Lens function, where you may post a photo of your outfit and get suggestions for similar outfits.
It is possible to use visual search to identify a similar or identical product to the one shown in a photograph or even a screenshot. Your customers can click on the image search button that opens their camera or upload an image of the item they want to buy into your ecommerce shop.
The AI-based visual search tool enables conducting an internet search using just images instead of words. Computer vision and machine learning are used in conjunction to make this work. Computer vision enables machines to “see” and “understand” a picture before machine learning decides what to do and how to process the information.
You can consider the example of the Amazon mobile app where you can point your phone’s camera at an object, and Amazon will recognize it. You will be shown the list of products matching your visual search.
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4. Product Suggestions
An ecommerce website can leverage Artificial Intelligence to suggest items that are a perfect fit for a certain customer. It must be able to decide how to produce and offer customized suggestions for customers by choosing from many product possibilities. This is a difficult and time-consuming process if done manually. A retail AI recommendation engine for your ecommerce business becomes necessary here.
Many ecommerce businesses have successfully increased their conversion rate with AI-powered product suggestions, and average order values also have. For instance, consider Amazon, whose AI-powered upselling and cross-selling generates more than a third of the company’s total revenue.
Also, AI can influence customers’ purchasing decisions because it leverages data from prior purchases, searched items, and internet browsing patterns. Aside from search and purchase history, AI uses visual data to recommend goods similar to ones the buyer has previously looked at.
Overall, AI-based product suggestions for your ecommerce business can offer you the following advantages:
- You will have a higher number of users who’d come back time and time again
- Drive customer loyalty that ensures better UX
- Personalized buying experience for customers
- Using suggestions to run a customized email campaign
5. Catch and Remove Fake Reviews
Research suggests that 54.7% of consumers would read at least four reviews before buying a product. This means reviews on the internet may significantly impact your business. A single negative review can ruin your brand’s reputation, whether from a competitor or a bot. Failing to monitor fake reviews may have you end up losing a large chunk of potential customers while sending a bad message.
You can tackle such a situation by using artificial intelligence in ecommerce. Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used by many online retailers to combat the proliferation of bogus customer reviews. For instance, Amazon created an internal artificial intelligence (AI) system that can recognize false reviews. When you have genuine views on your ecommerce site, you bolster customers’ faith in a product by highlighting verified consumers.
Unlike human-trained AI that relies on predefined keywords which the fake reviewers can fool, self-learning AI compares the reviews of each product to the industry’s standards and competitors. It ignores the suspicious reviews in calculating sentiment analysis if it detects anomalies.
Final Word
AI in ecommerce is a must-have in today’s time. This is an important technology that can help grow your business and stay competitive in the marketplace. It is possible to implement AI on a smaller scale for testing purposes and then define its scope.
You can consider the above-mentioned options to integrate AI into your ecommerce platform. It is also necessary to set the budget, envision the scope of implementation, and define a reasonable usage in times to come.
