We have Alexa at home to start the thermostat.
Google Maps is another AI-driven technology to show traffic and ETA prediction.
Uber relies on Machine learning to set the expected price of a ride and the best possible routes.
Banks have brought in AI to convert handwriting on check into digital format when clients upload the image of the check through their apps.
The point is here that AI has been gaining momentum in lives. It has revolutionized in many sectors.
But it has taken the e-commerce industry by a storm far more than others.
Many online businesses have experienced significant growth with AI. After all, machine learning not only automates their most mundane tasks but also delivers a more personalized shopping experience to the customers.
According to a study by Gartner, nearly 80-85% of customer’s engagement will be overseen by AI by 2020. Furthermore, the research says that AI can emerge as a top investment priority for over 20% of CIOs. No wonder why many e-commerce players have started incorporating AI and data analytics into their operations to achieve their goals.
Here I have explained some key points on how AI is revolutionizing e-commerce.
Promoting Personalization:
With machine learning, online platforms can enhance the personalization of customers with their products. Many companies use certain filters to provide their customers with recommendations that are mainly based on their search history, most viewing items, and trends.
For example, a customer searches for party wear shirts across the online shopping site. The filters sense the “tastes” or the priorities of the customers to make the product recommendation accordingly. This is just a basic example of how AI can help online stores to ensure a more personalized experience to the customers.
An improved personalization experience will encourage customers to shop more with you.
Making a Room for Visual Search:
Most of the users have come across something they didn’t see before. It could be any outfit or a gadget. How can they search for a certain item if they even don’t know its name?
AI can be useful in such scenarios, thanks to its image search capabilities. And this is beneficial for online platforms. Customers can upload an image of any product of their choice, and the website will come up with identical or similar products.
This is because AI software is trained to make the best possible predictions on a unique data set. This is termed as supervised learning. Image classification is one of the categories of this learning type. For example, AI software can be trained to understand the difference between a cat and a dog by providing multiple images of cats and dogs with the correct label.
It compares specific components of the images with its corresponding labels to show the results. These “1234” code on an image indicates that it is a cat and these “ABCD” features on an image show that it is a dog.
Machine learning algorithms are supposed to play an important role in the e-commerce industry, especially in this era ruled by visual platforms like Instagram, where the consumer’s attention span is dramatically reduced. Therefore, image search has become an important technology to let customers find similar ones as they upload the picture.
Optimizing SEO:
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a crucial part to ensure the success of your e-commerce.
It involves the creation and implementation of several SEO strategies to drive traffic to a website. Organic traffic, which comes to your site from unpaid sources, is more effective to boost the ranking of your site.
Writing keywords in image tags are used to optimize images for search results. But it is a challenging process when you have hundreds or thousands of product images to deal with.
Luckily, AI is also useful in this scenario. It can optimize their product images to enhance SEO.
For example, it can create tags in different languages to broader its reach to global customers. A white shirt can be translated by AI technology in several languages from English. Moreover, it can also consider the context. For example, it can know the difference between “bear” (to tolerate) and “bear” (an animal).
Improving Inventory Management:
Efficient inventory management can be done by knowing exactly what products are available for sale when more are adding up, what has already gone, and much more. This information is utilized to inform promotions and marketing. Besides, it is a critical part of sales, customer care, and other processes.
AI can help optimize inventory at all levels in the supply chain. It not only tells what’s left in the stock but also predicts future buying behavior so that you can keep your stock updated.
Enhancing Email Marketing:
Email marketing is a common practice among online stores to build and reinforce their connection with shoppers. Most emails are personalized and sent on a defined schedule so that a shopper can take quick action.
With AI, email marketing is more powerful and has better chances to yield higher conversions, including data analysis, automation, and personalization.
AI helps you run a focused email campaign driven by customer data based on past purchases, interests, and browsing behaviors of the customers. This helps you make more customized emails that are personalized to each of your customers.
Apart from automating your campaigns, AI determines the right times to automatically deliver emails based on your customers’ activity history. For example, it can factor in the time zones, downtimes, and habits of your subscribers to regulate the schedule of sending out your emails.
Bottom Line:
AI is expected to shape up the e-commerce world to make online shopping an enjoyable, personalized experience for the customers.
That’s why you as an e-commerce business should find out how to incorporate AI with your online store. Whether you want to use it for visual search options, implement live video, or customer supports chatbots, AI will help you stay ahead most of your competitors.
What do you think? Do you think AI is essential for your business? Or you have other ideas to make it useful for online businesses? Don’t hold your opinions back! Drop them in the comment box below!
Author Bio: Helen Wilson is a marketing manager at Savah, a product that helps teams with an all-in-one platform for prototyping, design collaboration tools, and workflow.
