AI in e-commerce isn t just a ‘nice to have anymore. It s essential to running your business, making sales and giving your customers the seamless experience they ve come to expect.
E-commerce technology is moving at lightning speed, constantly improving and updating. In this article we share the best ways to use tech and AI to boost your e-commerce business.
What is AI?
It s helpful to begin with our definition of AI before we discuss the ways AI solutions can help your e-commerce business.
AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. Something which is artificial has been created by humans. So AI is a machine which can show near-human intelligence. It s often confused with Machine Learning, although it does contain some aspects of Machine Learning. Francois Chollet, an AI researcher at Google defines intelligence as "not skill itself, it's not what you can do, it's how well and how efficiently you can learn new things."
In the 1950s, Minsky and McCarthy coined the term Artificial Intelligence in the US and became the founders of the discipline. They described AI as “any task performed by a machine that would have previously been considered to require human intelligence.” The definition has become narrower from there, but it s helpful to know this is where AI began its journey.
Benefits of Artificial Intelligence in E-Commerce
The benefits of AI in e-commerce are constantly increasing as new technologies emerge. They help you connect with customers on a personal level, improve the user journey, increase sales, manage your inventory and so much more.
The benefits of Artificial Intelligence in e-commerce include:
Personalisation is a great way to increase your sales, as you show users the products they want to see. It also boosts company loyalty as users feel they ve received a personal service. Plus, if they know your site s the most convenient and tailored to their needs, they re more likely to return and purchase again. This is a great example of AI in retail, where you can suggest more than one product to a customer, or related products, and increase the basket value.
Save time and money by using AI in your e-commerce business. Automating back office functions, website, marketing and more can help you save time and man hours, which can be spent driving your business forward and coming up with new ideas instead.
Available 24/7. The rise of tools like chatbots have helped companies stay open and reachable to their customers all day, every day. Customer service, sales and other teams can then take over more complicated problems while AI does a lot of the hard work of fact finding and answering FAQs for them.
Increase efficiency. AI in e-commerce helps you to get the smaller, more tedious jobs done. This increases the efficiency of your teams and the business as a whole. It allows them to spend their time on more important tasks which are harder to automate.
Increase safety in your business using AI. Several tools are able to detect fraud and scams, and there s also much less likelihood of human error.
Uses of AI in E-Commerce
New uses of AI in e-commerce are being developed constantly. There are AI tools to help your business in almost every capacity. Here are some great Artificial Intelligence examples.
Chatbots
Chatbots are a great example of the way businesses can use AI in e-commerce. They allow you to take customers through FAQs, all with the feel of speaking to a real person. This saves your customer services team time by gathering all of the information they need, or solving the problem for the customer without needing their input. Chatbots are available 24/7 and they can process information through text, as well as voice-based interactions.
Product Recommendations
Personalised product recommendations is one of the leading ways to enhance the customer experience in retail using AI. It s shown to reduce cart abandonment by up to 4.35%. It also increases AOVs (Average Order Values) by 11%, and improves conversion rates by around 26%. Benefits of AI product recommendations:
- Increase Average Order Value (AOV)
- Increase conversion rate
- Reduce cart abandonment
- Improve customer retention
- Personalise your customers interactions with your business
- Enable you to create personalised retargeting and email campaigns
Personalisation
Personalisation is one of the best ways to improve your customer experience using AI in retail. Recommend products depending on your user s behaviour, demographics and their journey through the website. Using AI to personalise your customers experiences also means you can analyse customer behaviour through all of their touchpoints, not just your website.
Virtual Assistant
The world of e-commerce is missing a much-loved customer experience, in the form of expert customer assistants. Virtual assistants can provide this function by making suggestions to users based on their preferences and what you already know about them. This is a great use of AI in retail for clothing brands, where you may already know a customers size.
Inventory Management
Long gone are the days of worrying about user error and guessing forecasts in your inventory management systems. One of the most useful uses of AI in e-commerce is to predict stock and inventory levels based on sales trends, which can stretch back years, predicted changes in demand, and predicted errors in inventory management before they become a problem. This can then be extended into Artificial Intelligence examples in the physical space, where AI robots are used to fulfill orders and store stock.
Retargeting
Using all of this customer data you ve gathered from your AI systems, you can retarget customers based on their personal preferences. You may have found their personal preferences based on their interactions with your chatbot or virtual assistant, or from the way they interacted with your site. This allows you to begin an email or other marketing retargeting campaign and increase customer lifetime value and conversion rates.
Examples of AI in Ecommerce
The best example of AI in e-commerce is Amazon. They use almost all of the tools and strategies above. Some of the most recent ways they ve used AI to transform their e-commerce site are:
- Product graphs are created using Machine Learning. This creates complex links between products and enables Amazon s pioneering personalisation and product recommendations.
- AI in the fulfillment centre. AI is used to speed up all order fulfillment processes, even down to directing staff to pick up and package items in a particular order.
- Amazon Go. Amazon s physical stores are leading the way in shopping for food and essentials. AI allows customers to simply sign in with their Amazon account and then pick up items, add them to their basket and simply walk out of the store, paying automatically through the app.
At ADAMAPP we have a full suite of AI tools to help you increase profits. Our AI ecommerce tools help you:
- Personlise your offers, predict user patterns and recommend products to increase your Average Basket Value.
- Adjust pricing dynamically depending on the season, customer demand and competitor prices.
- Create personalised discounts and deals.
- And much more.
AI Solutions at ADAMAPP
At ADAMAPP, we work in partnership with your team to really understand your needs and ensure we re delivering the AI solutions that work best for your business and goals. Find out more about our team and learn more about our services.
Don t need an AI solution for your e-commerce business? We cover a whole range of industries and offer everything from AI in retail online to AI in store.