Artificial intelligence is now having an impressive share of e-commerce success. About 35% of the overall revenue of the Amazon e-commerce platform is from upselling, which is largely powered by AI tools. AI primarily enables the product recommendation technology of the tech giants like Amazon and Alibaba. Apart from the task of product recommendations, AI is also utilized by online retailers for many other services like chatbots, customer comment reviews, providing personalized suggestions to shoppers, etc. A study had shown that every one out of five consumers is now willing to purchase the products or services suggested by the chatbots based on their interests. About 40 % of all online shoppers are now looking for offers that are customized to them by AI chatbot.
While e-commerce sales globally are hitting about the $5 billion mark by the end of 2021, Gartner predicts that AI-based technologies will manage about 80% of the customer interactions in this sector. So, let us explore how AI is going to change the e-commerce sector in the coming years. We will also try to explore some of the most important applications of AI in e-commerce and the real-time examples of it in the industry.
AI transforming the shopping experience
Usage of AI in shopping is now transforming the way how retailers function online. With AI support, you can easily predict the shopping patterns of the consumers based on their historical data and what the shoppers tend to buy, and when. Say, for example, if an online shopper tried to frequently buy a brand of a specific consumable every week, then the retailers will be able to send personalized offers to them from time to time to motivate the shoppers to buy again at the specific time.
Machine learning can enable these recommendations for most-selling products and offer some supplementary products that go well with these. For e-commerce, AI can also take up the role of digital assistants like the Duplex tool of Google, which has the capabilities to create a custom grocery list based on the natural voice commands of the shoppers and even place online shopping orders for them. Further, let us evaluate the major AI applications in e-com.
E commerce applications of AI
Even though there are a lot of benefits of artificial intelligence in e-com, let us explore four of the major applications which are now dominating the industry.
- AI chatbots and virtual assistants
Online retailers are now increasingly using chatbots or digital assistants to provide customer support 24/7. These tools are built using artificial intelligence technologies, and the bots ports are now getting more intelligent to enable a human-like customer experience. Apart from offering customer support, chatbots can also enhance the impact of the artificial intelligence applications in e-commerce through unique capabilities like NLP or National Language Processing, which can easily integrate voice-based interactions.
- Addressing the needs of the consumers through deeper insights
Enabling AI-based self-learning will improve the overall customer experience over time, and it can also provide personalized and targeted offers to customers based on their historical behavior online. While thinking of AI adoption for e-com businesses, it is also essential that you need to maintain a solid database at the backend to enable the AI applications in a full-fledged manner. RemoteDBA.com offers dedicated database support for AI-based apps, which you can consult for your e-com business too.
- Providing product recommendations
Among all the major applications of AI, product recommendations in a highly personalized manner are increasing the conversion rates by about 900% now. It also helps to increase the average order value by about 3%. By using big data and artificial intelligence in e-commerce, AI now impacts customer choices based on the knowledge it had previously gained from the customer data.
- Customer retention
AI tools can track the online browsing patterns of the customers and put forth the exact product recommendations, which offer various benefits for e-commerce retailers. A bigger number of returning customers will ultimately improve the customer retention rate and enhance sales figures. AI also helps provide a personalized shopping experience for online shoppers and enables business email campaigns in a personalized way.
- Artificial intelligence-driven personalization in e-com
It is considered the most effective model of AI, where personalization is the core of e-commerce. Given the historical data gathered from various online customers of a particular platform, machine learning and artificial intelligence can derive important and actionable user insights. For example, to see their behavior in online interactions, ai-powered bi tool like Boomtrain can now analyze customer information from various data points, including email campaigns, websites, and mobile applications. All these insights will enable the retailers to make suitable product recommendations and offer a unique user experience.
- Inventory management
Foolproof inventory management is crucial in e-commerce that will help maintain the right balance in product availability and demand. It is difficult to suffice the market demand without having an ideal stock. The conventional inventory management models are restricted to stock levels where the AI-enabled model is now offering stocks maintenance based on data-related market trends, anticipated changes in product demand-supply related challenges, etc.
Apart from considering inventory management as a standalone entity, AI will enable businesses to handle warehouse management with the help of automated robots, which are considered as the future of AI in e-com. Like human enables, robots will be able to store and retrieve stocks round the clock along with immediate dispatching of the orders based on the demand. So, in addition to transforming the industry in various ways, AI is now transforming B2B e-commerce also by driving many innovative solutions.
To conclude, we can say that AI is now transforming the specialty of e-commerce in all aspects of it, from product suggestions to expedited delivery. If you are already running your e-com business or planning to set it up now, it is essential to review your use case in light of the AI possibilities. As the future is going to be of artificial intelligence, you will not be able to survive without adopting the same into your business. So, suppose you start it at the very fundamental level of your business. In that case, it becomes much easier and flexible for you to adapt to the changes and thereby ensure optimum growth and returns in your business. To find more information about importance of branding, you should try Tips For Selling Amazon Private Label Products for Amazon sales.