The AI Revolution in eCommerce
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has affected almost every single industry out there. In particular, AI is being used more and more in the eCommerce industry by a massive number of retailers. This trend doesn’t seem to be slowing down either – AI usage is only increasing day by day. The next two years are expected to see a massive surge in AI use, with the eCommerce industry being no exception.
A lot of aspects of eCommerce are changing due to AI use, as it can make so many processes quicker and cheaper. Brands such as Amazon aren’t an exception to the rule, as they’ve been using AI for a range of reasons.
Why Should you Even Think About Using AI for Your eCommerce Business?
You’ve seen personalised recommendations based on your viewing history. You might have also used a chatbot to get immediate help.
Retailers are almost required to have an eCommerce platform in this day and age in order to keep up with their competitors. In doing so, AI is able to automate and make a lot of processes much more efficient than they would otherwise be. With AI, marketing has moved to the next level. Now, retailers can give their customers a more personalised experience by looking at things like their buying and viewing habits.
Marketing has been taken to the next level, enabling retailers to personalise the user experience for their customers by having access to information such as buying and viewing patterns. Retailers are almost required to have an eCommerce platform in this day and age in order to keep up with their competitors.
The best part of AI is the cost efficiency that it provides your eCommerce business. Reliance on people to carry out certain tasks can now be automated. Being able to save time with AI means that costs are cut down drastically.
You’re probably still not convinced by the whole hype around AI.
Let’s take a look at some examples of how you can use AI in your eCommerce business:
Personalised Recommendations
Personalised recommendations are a huge area of eCommerce that can’t be ignored. 31% of eCommerce revenue is made up of personalised product recommendations. This is often carried out by using data such as browsing history, click-through rates, and purchase history. Personalisation was used as a strategy that existed before AI, but not nearly as much as it is now.
Some eCommerce sites have tens of thousands of products, as well as a massive number of customers visiting at the same time. AI provides a means of personalisation to each and every one of your customers in a way that wouldn’t be possible normally.
Cart abandonment is a common problem that eCommerce businesses face. It’s reported that around $4.6 trillion is lost to cart abandonment. Personalised recommendations using AI can help lower cart abandonment rates by reminding the user of the product that they previously left in their cart. AI can be used to provide users with personalised offers on their products. This is in addition to carrying out email marketing containing an offer or recommendation.
Customer Segmentation
Understanding your customer is essential to getting your marketing strategies right. It allows you to group your customers into specific categories, allowing you to target each group in a personalised and specific manner. Improving customer segmentation is crucial to avoiding budget waste, and improving customer satisfaction.
AI is providing a way of carrying out customer segmentation via machine learning, allowing for data analysis and providing valuable insight into trends. Doing customer segmentation manually would take a lot of time to go through huge amounts of data and find the relevant trends. It also wasn’t accurate when carried out manually. Customer segmentation can be done much quicker and to a high degree of accuracy using AI.
Chatbots
Having 24/7 customer service that’s engaging and solves problems is quite costly through normal means. However, chatbots are changing that. They act as a virtual assistant that eCommerce businesses can use to significantly increase customer engagement. Chatbots use Natural Language Processing (NLP), which is used to help the chatbot analyse and understand the text. It can then provide an appropriate response.
If your customer has any questions about a product, a chatbot can answer them immediately. Additionally, responses provided by the chatbot can be personalised. The chatbot can use previous customer interactions to make product suggestions. In addition, the use of chatbots frees up time for your customer service executives, allowing them to focus on more difficult and demanding tasks.
Marketing
Having a huge boost to the marketing side of things is a massive advantage of using AI. Marketing is impacted by AI beyond just personalised recommendations for customers. Order/purchase management is made more efficient, as order managers don’t need to carry out tasks such as shipping label printing. Order/purchase management is made more efficient, as order managers don’t need to carry out tasks such as shipping label printing.
Order/purchase management is made more efficient, as order managers don’t need to carry out tasks such as shipping label printing. AI is able to automate these tasks, along with having systems that carry out planning and inventory management.
Additionally, ads can also be automated with AI. Typically, marketing campaigns are carried out manually to collect data. These campaigns were rerun with a focus on the right audience using information from the previous marketing campaign. Nowadays, these tasks can all be done automatically with machine learning algorithms that can carry out ad campaigns on platforms such as Google and Instagram.
Marketing isn’t an easy thing to get right – especially in a short amount of time. AI automation will save you a lot of headaches on the marketing side of things for sure.
Manufacturing
Manufacturing is one of the more costly aspects of eCommerce and retail in general. Although, AI is becoming more and more widespread in manufacturing to improve efficiency and lower costs. Controlling the production process usually takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money. But, AI can help reduce these costs and save time.
It’s also good to know that production process control is normally a time-consuming and expensive aspect of manufacturing, but can be reduced with the use of AI. Moreover, various processes in manufacturing can be automated. Accidents can be avoided via data forecasting from AI analysis of huge quantities of data. Equipment diagnosis is another area of manufacturing that AI can take care of.
With AI, pretty much the whole spectrum of manufacturing processes can be made easier.
Summing Up
AI has completely changed the eCommerce landscape. The time and money it can save cannot be ignored, which is why many eCommerce sites have already adopted AI usage. This trend of increasing AI use isn’t slowing down, and is expected to only increase as time goes on.
Almost every aspect of eCommerce can be made more efficient with the use of AI. Customer service is drastically improved with chatbots, providing 24/7 service. Customers can be given personalised suggestions to reduce the number of times they abandon their shopping carts. This will help increase the total number of items your eCommerce business sells.
The AI revolution in eCommerce is just getting started, and it’s definitely not something you want to miss out on.
Contact us at Wow Group if you need any help with using AI for your business.
