Ecommerce is a very dynamic and competitive industry. The competition is becoming more and more fierce, and you need to be creative to stay in it. So, how can you differentiate your brand and give a boost to your business?
The adoption of AI is happening at a rapid pace and companies are integrating AI into their customer service departments at an accelerated rate. The road for AI has been paved and businesses are adopting it.
According to Statista, the number of customer service initiatives using AI or chatbots is projected to grow from 15% in 2018 to 53% in 2022.
In this article, we’re going to highlight the ways to use AI in eCommerce.
8 Revolutionary Ways AI Changing E-commerce
The eCommerce industry has gone through a lot of changes since the advent of platform giants like Amazon, and small businesses are constantly trying to keep up with the new technologies that are on the rise. The retail industry is huge, owing to a whopping $25.54 trillion in 2017.
What's even more interesting is that new technologies and innovations will only become more prevalent. More so, artificial intelligence (AI) will be especially useful for the eCommerce industry, as it can reduce operational complexities and inefficiencies for small businesses making use of online platforms.
Here is a look at how AI is helping to change the way eCommerce works.
- AI-Assisted Product Recommendations
- Advanced Semantic-Based Search
- Chatbots
- Virtual Assistants
- AI in Achieving Sales goals
- Efficient Company-Wide Decision Making
- Cybersecurity Enhancement
- Fighting Fake Reviews
1. AI-Assisted Product Recommendations
The eCommerce industry is a multi-billion-dollar industry. With the introduction of many new technologies, including the internet, eCommerce has been able to grow into this large market.
However, one aspect where eCommerce has consistently lagged behind is the technology used for product recommendations.
Since its inception, eCommerce has been using basic product recommendation methods involving customer behaviors and their online behavior.
While these methods have proved to be successful, they do not provide the level of sophistication that a complex ecosystem like eCommerce requires.
Key advantages:
- AI-assisted product recommendations ensure that shoppers find the products that are right for them in a sea of choices.
- This technology predicts what you want to buy before you even know you want to buy it.
2. Advanced Semantic-Based Search
Semantic search engines, like Autocomplete, Google Ngram Viewer, or Google Correlate are very good at indexing documents, but not good at indexing products or images. Traditional e-commerce search engines use keywords to match product titles and descriptions.
Semantic-based search engines process the meanings and full-text content of each document or page they index. They understand even the smallest nuances such as whether a word is plural when it should be used in a sentence, and in what context it should be used.
Full-text processing also recognizes products by their features and price points in addition to brand and specific product names. That way all of the similar products and services come up for each search term – just like Google does for any generic search you run.
Key advantages:
- Semantic-based search engines understand even the smallest nuances such as whether a word is plural when it should be used in a sentence and in what context it should be used.
- Empowered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, the search and predictive analytics capabilities of the Semantic-based search engines platform create a more contextual shopping experience.
A chatbot is a digital, intelligent computer agent that conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods. For example, in the context of a business, chatbot technology can be used by a customer service representative to assist customers through a contact center interface.
Chatbot for eCommerce plays a pivotal role to improve the online shopping experience, provide better customer satisfaction, and most importantly increase conversion rates.
For starters, its intelligent messaging features, combined with the ease of use and convenience of ordering products online have already made it a natural hit with customers.
At the same time, Chatbot is making shopping more convenient for businesses, which can now interact directly with their clientele, without spending money on maintaining a large workforce of customer service representatives.
Key advantages:
- The platform is also driving up sales, by creating a seamless buying experience for users.
- A chatbot is an affordable and highly scalable solution for both businesses and consumers alike. This has made it a hit with eCommerce giants such as Amazon, Kodak, and more than 1,000 others.
- It is rapidly growing in popularity and is expected to be the next big thing in E-commerce.
Virtual sssistants are changing the e-commerce industry by allowing e-merchants to drastically increase their productivity.
With the rapid expansion of e-commerce, brand competition is becoming increasingly fierce. At the same time, shoppers are also demanding an excellent shopping experience.
On the other hand, the emergence of AI virtual assistants greatly changed the way we communicate. Consumers are now accustomed to interacting with smart speaker devices and chatbots.
As the year 2017 becomes a year of intelligent voice interaction, taking advantage of these AI virtual assistants has become an inevitable trend for e-commerce companies.
Key advantages:
- An ecommerce intelligence virtual assistant can take care of these tasks efficiently by acting as a personal assistant for small businesses.
- Keeping a check on the order status and optimizing the listing, creating a great user experience, increasing brand awareness, etc.
5. AI in Achieving Sales Goals
AI suggests products that are likely to be interesting for you, based on your past purchases and activity on social networks, and reacts to your feedback about each product as it arrives in your online shopping cart, allowing you to change your mind at any time.
This is not only a perfect solution for shoppers overwhelmed by the number of choices available when shopping online, but also for e-commerce businesses looking for ways to boost their sales and become more competitive through Artificial Intelligence.
Key advantages:
- Software like REVE Chat makes use of Artificial Intelligence to forecast future sales based on customer patterns and plays a key role for the company in predicting the results of their marketing efforts.
- It provides statistics that help to make better decisions.
6. Efficient Company-wide Decision Making
As artificial intelligence technology and machine learning in ecommerce continues to emerge, delivering better and faster results than human intelligence, it is clear that AI helps generate more efficient results for businesses.
In fact, a recent study from PwC showed that 82 percent of companies expect to increase their AI investment in the next two years. With initiatives like Google's DeepMind and Facebook's FAIR lab, it is clear that the leaders in tech are investing significantly in AI research.
In recent years, we've seen how AI can help business leaders gain a better understanding of customer needs, help businesses scale customer service, and build more efficient supply chains.
Key advantages:
- Gathering data from company-wide resources and comparing it with structured information from the traditional databases helps identify patterns, outliers, and anomalies in real-time.
- This module computes the behavioral trends of various stakeholders and allows for a better understanding of the reasons behind an unexpected action, low or high sales figures, or other issues.
7. Cybersecurity Enhancement
The Internet has been a great boon to businesses and consumers worldwide – improving people's ability to reach new markets, research products, and decide what products to buy.
"It has also created fresh challenges for businesses, both large and small, who rely on the Internet as an integral part of their sales, marketing, and operations.
The nascent technology of artificial intelligence, if applied using the right methodology, can help cybersecurity enhancement in e-commerce provide a balanced approach that ensures that consumers can enjoy the benefits of e-commerce while business owners can operate securely.
Key advantages:
- Artificial Intelligence is fast in detecting cyber breaches, and eCommerce sites are currently using it to protect their systems.
- eCommerce artificial intelligence helps to protect websites from hackers.
8. Fighting Fake Reviews
Fighting fake reviews is an ongoing battle for e-commerce platforms, which are always on the lookout for new ways to remove fraudulent reviews from their sites.
Staying ahead of the fraudsters is an ongoing challenge, particularly when the nature of the fraud is constantly evolving. This can mean that traditional approaches to filtering reviews are not always successful in weeding out malicious user-generated content.
Key advantages:
- AI utilizes natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning in eCommerce to detect fake reviews and identify potentially fraudulent accounts.
- AI ensures that malicious users can't just simply change their behavior to avoid detection.
Why Is Ecommerce Artificial Intelligence Important?
Ecommerce is growing fast, and the speed of its growth is only accelerating. In the U.K., the number of people doing their weekly shopping online has increased by more than 400% in the last five years alone.
In the US, China, and India, eCommerce sales will grow more than 10 times faster between 2017 and 2022 than they did in the previous five-year period.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the next big thing in technology. You may have heard of AI but you might still be wondering what it is and how it can be used to improve business.
The truth is, Artificial Intelligence today is impacting us all whether we realize it or not. The applications of AI in eCommerce are endless for a number of reasons.
● The most important reason is that AI allows for what's called machine learning, which means that systems can "learn" over time and improve the more they are used.
● It also gives you insights into how your customers behave and predicts their behavior based on your historical data.
Summary
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the next big thing in technology. You may have heard of AI but you might still be wondering what it is and how it can be used to improve business. The truth is, artificial intelligence in eCommerce today is impacting us all whether we realize it or not.
AI is basically the automation of many tasks, we could use it to automate our business processes, optimize performance and drive customer experience.
There is no doubt that eCommerce is a very dynamic and competitive industry. The competition is becoming more and more fierce, and you need to be creative to stay in it. In this case, Integrating AI into eCommerce can differentiate your brand and give a boost to your business.
