Artificial Intelligence or AI is one of the latest technologies that has reshaped almost every industry by streamlining their work processes and providing a plethora of other benefits. The e-commerce industry is not far behind when it comes to incorporating the use of AI in order to provide their customers with a seamless and personalized experience.
The simple reason being that today, every industry has realized the fact that they cannot sustain in the present competitive scenario if they do not elevate their technology usage. So, let’s get started and discover how impactful AI has been in the past or can be in the future for the e-commerce industry.
Top AI and E-commerce Statistics
- As per a report by Statista, the amount for worldwide revenue from AI in 2018 was a whopping $482 billion, and by 2024, this figure is likely to go beyond $3061 billion
- Another study by Statista reported the number of global sales in 2018 of the e-commerce industry to be approximately $2.8 trillion, and by 2021, this figure is likely to surpass $4.88 trillion
- According to the Ubisend Report:-
- 20% of customers are happy to buy a product from the chatbots
- 40% of customers find the top deals with the help of chatbots
- In 2014, Google acquired DeepMind (a leading AI company) for $500 million
Top 7 Ways to Integrate AI with E-commerce
1. Predict Services or Sales
E-commerce business is all about online sales, and anything that can drive sales becomes a top favorite amongst owners. AI’s capability to predict sales after the assessment of massive datasets and understanding the pattern of customer behavior is what makes it extremely beneficial for the e-commerce industry.
For example, Netflix successfully uses AI to know about customer viewing demands and offer the same through information interpretation and collection automation.
2. Automate Back-Office Processes
Most of the back-office processes comprise of tasks which need manual efforts for the management of data and products, which are error-prone and time-consuming at the same time. Automation is the only solution to reduce this type of unproductive workload and pay attention to the other important tasks.
Image Recognition technology by AI is used aggressively by the e-commerce owners for categorizing the products. For instance, Pinterest uses this technology to enable its users to look for a particular element in the photo.
3. Re-target Potential Customers
If we go by the stats of Conversica, the sales team is unable to follow 33% of the leads generated by the marketing team. This clearly means that the sales team has missed out on the new opportunities generated for the business.
This is where the role of AI comes in as it can help you do the groundwork for those missed customers and again offer them products based on the data related to their interests and behaviors, explains a provider of ecommerce catalog management services. This way, you will be able to convert your missed customers into your existing customers.
4. Provide Exceptional Customer Service
Exceptional service can only be provided when you are available for the customers 24/7, and manual efforts to achieve the same appears overwhelming. However, with the help of AI, you can achieve this effortlessly in the form of chatbots who are ready to assist customers 24/7.
These bots not only eliminate the need for human efforts but also bring down the customer service cost at large, along with assisting the customers with perfection.
5. Offer Trending Personalized Contents
Writing algorithms to predict what the customer wants to see is not as effective as using artificial intelligence to provide personalized content and that too, which is trending. This content will be provided to the customers based on present trending brands, customer requirements, countries, channels, and more.
Eventually, it is all about optimizing the experience of the customers when they come to shop on your e-commerce website and by offering trending personalized content, you will be in the same league as Amazon who has successfully implemented the use of AI for this.
6. Optimize Recommendations & Searches
One of the major functions of AI is to optimize the recommendations and searches for the customers. Having WooCommerce specialty on your e-commerce site is recommended for this. The traditional search boxes fail to win the hearts of the customers as optimizing the search box and offering recommendations to them after the intelligent analysis is what makes the customers happy, and for this, the use of AI is imperative.
For instance, Go Find uses AI to recommend similar products to its users by asking to take a picture and share it with them.
7. Differentiate Between Privacy and Personalization
It is a known fact by now that user privacy is very sensitive, and companies should tackle it very carefully. Personalization is something which is appreciated by customers greatly but exposing their privacy is not accepted by them at all. This is the reason brands are trying to strive for honesty, transparency, and security during customer interactions. However, brands cannot lose out on the benefits of personalization.
So, what is the solution? The solution lies in taking the help of AI for balancing the two aspects. If you provide users something in return for their personal information, they do not mind it. For instance, Google Now uses AI to synchronize search habits, calendar, and e-mails, along with a brief which states all that you will get in exchange for the personal information according to the schedule.
Conclusion
This brings us to the conclusion that Artificial Intelligence is indeed a game-changer in the e-commerce industry. It not only helps in reducing the manual efforts through automation like ecommerce data entry but also provides intelligent insights into customer data in the form of interests and behaviors, which ultimately enables the e-commerce owners to offer personalized solutions to the customers. Advancements in technology have benefitted e-commerce giants like Amazon who have made complete use of AI and if they can do it with AI, so can any other e-commerce store.
