Six ways AI is revolutionizing ecommerce

The global revenue from artificial intelligence will reach $36 billion by 2025. A lot of that is because of the contribution of AI in empowering ecommerce including UX that directly impacts SEO. 

The far-reaching AI applications in ecommerce allow businesses to increase their profits by optimizing and automating decision-making, right from web design to customer support.

AI helps online businesses identify patterns from unstructured data sets and enables them to offer a personalized experience. Here’s how AI is empowering the ecommerce industry.

1. Rise of voice assistants and voice search

AI has the potential to increase ecommerce website accessibility and empower users through voice assistants. 

With bigger product directories and more information, AI-powered voice assistants allow customers to use natural language for reducing or eliminating manual effort, making it easier for them to accomplish tasks. 

Technological developments have made voice assistants and voice search highly capable of using AI. They now offer a robust speech recognition experience while the artificial intelligence aspect handles challenges like background noise and accents. 

Ecommerce bigwigs like Amazon already allow users to look for the best deals and purchase online with voice-controlled assistants. Unsurprisingly, voice commerce sales will hit the $40 billion mark by 2022.

2. Building estores from scratch

Web store design has grown exponentially in sophistication and scale in the last decade. In fact, it has become so advanced that AI is now doing the job for you. 

The combination of artificial intelligence and machine learning enables artificial design intelligence (ADI) tools to decipher creative rules and apply them independently. This allows the technology to automate web design work, going as far as to help users build estores from scratch. 

Powerful website builders like Wix offers AI-powered design assistance, which lets you create estores in as little as 30 minutes. The tool asks you a series of questions, including the type of website you want and your design preferences. Within 2 minutes, you get a customizable, fully-featured website that comes pre-populated with elements such as contact details and logos. Of course, you’re still able to tweak the design but this approach works great for users who want to get a website up and running fast. 

3. Chatbots: Enabling more sales and better customer service

AI-powered chatbots allow you to sell to the right person at the right time. No wonder 80% of businesses are estimated to start using chatbots in 2020. 

Customers, especially millennials, are tired of waiting long to speak to an actual representative when they call a company. They prefer chatbots that are faster and deal with inquiries more quickly, lowering the average wait time from 11 minutes to 45 seconds. 

Chatbots can be used to:

• Deliver 24 x 7 customer service to ensure global coverage
• Upsell based on the user’s past purchases
• Recover abandoned carts by sending well-planned reminders
• Answer customer questions on-the-go while they’re shopping
• Offer exclusive codes and coupons to customers
• Free up your manual customer service’s time to focus more on product/deal explanations and business development

The immediate response from a chatbot keeps your customers hooked and more likely to complete their purchases after receiving an immediate response. Also, personalized responses via a chatbot are a great enabler. In fact, if shoppers think they are getting a personalized deal, they may be tempted to follow-through.

4. Hyper personalized product recommendations

AI-powered product recommendations can grow ecommerce revenues by up to 16%. When a shopper creates an account with an ecommerce portal, every browsing session and transaction results in data. 

An AI algorithm can then process this data, to predict the products that this shopper is likely to purchase.  These hyper-personalized recommendations are valuable for the ecommerce platform (by promoting more product visibility and driving sales). 

Moreover, they benefit the consumer as well by reducing the cognitive effort that shoppers otherwise have to invest in going through dozens of products. Seamless product browsing and selection experience make a shopper come back to an ecommerce platform for more. This will translate into increased loyalty for e-retailers. 

5. Better inventory management and sales forecasting

Use AI-powered tools to manage your inventory with the strictest possible control, minus any manual effort. Store precisely what you require and optimize your stock levels at all times. 

Adding AI capabilities to an ecommerce stores inventory campaign helps avoid overstocking, thereby decreasing the amount of money held in goods, and freeing up space. 

Amazon uses AI to automate its inventory management process, reducing the time spent in moving products across storage hubs. 

AI also helps eretailers create consignments with intelligent volumetric weight calculations, such that logistics costs are minimized. In a similar way, AI can also help fine-tune the sales forecasting activity for any ecommerce company. This helps the e-retailer promote products that are much likely to sell. 

Dynamic A/B testing allows AI-powered sales forecasting solutions to always keep on optimizing their model, driving better results for businesses. 

6. Superior security for customer data 

The biggest responsibility for ecommerce stores is keeping customer data secure. 

Estores are vulnerable to fraudulent activities like hacking and need to be extra careful. Thankfully, AI helps increase the security of your database. 

Because of the integration of deep learning and AI into security solutions, ecommerce platforms keep common network vulnerabilities and spam at bay and keep customer data secure. 

AI can process huge volumes of exhaustive, repetitive data quickly and can nip fraudulent activities in the bud by detecting anomalies.

AI holds the power to improve the performance of ecommerce sites and forward-thinking retailers are using the technology to great effect. Online retailers are harnessing AI’s predictive capabilities to develop stronger relationships with customers by personalizing user experiences, thereby generating repeat business. For many ecommerce websites, AI provides an undeniable competitive advantage. However, it will soon become a part of everyday business and those that integrate it within their operations will stay one step ahead of the pack.