2023 Report: The Future of AI in Ecommerce

Using AI in ecommerce is no longer aforethought; it is the reality that every ecommerce brand must integrate throughout their business. Many ecommerce business owners (often unknowingly) use AI tools to improve one or more facets of their business today. Across all ecommerce markets, there will be explosive growth in machine learning and deep learning tool usage over the next five years. 

Let’s look at what makes Ecommerce artificial intelligence worthwhile and how savvy ecommerce managers incorporate these tools into their platforms. 

The Benefits of Leveraging AI To Grow Your Ecommerce Business.

Artificial intelligence has changed and will continue to change the ecommerce game. As these tools continue to grow in utility and use, more businesses look to them to improve their operations. 

At this point, AI tools are available (somewhat surprisingly) to businesses of all sizes. What propels big companies is also available to help grow smaller ecommerce operations. 

For example, AI tools today can help ecommerce sites provide answers to customer problems before they occur. Using data gathered from customer social media accounts, shopping histories, and data collecting services allows ecommerce sites to craft AI-based recommendations to customers via ads or ecommerce site suggestions.

Ecommerce businesses can also use AI tools to aid in customer retention. AI technologies such as chatbots, automated email, marketing campaigns, and similar tools help keep customers informed about what the business offers. This constant exposure keeps the business fresh in customer’s minds, encouraging them to revisit your website. 

The primary benefit of ecommerce AI tools comes down to their always-active nature. AI can run any time of day, helping to generate business for you regardless of when you can work. Increasing your company’s efficiency and working hours increases the chances that someone shops on your platform. 

12 Ways AI Is Disrupting Ecommerce

AI tools continue to change the way ecommerce conducts itself. Here are twelve ways artificial intelligence works to disrupt traditional eCommerce operations: 

Social Commerce

The development of social commerce marketing strategies offers AI technology a significant chance of reaching new and larger audiences. 

Current social commerce strategies use social media metrics, such as likes and shares, to promote marketing materials and grade their performance. A full-scale social commerce campaign increases the flow of customers to an ecommerce platform more than standard means. 

AI tools help businesses better target their audience with social commerce strategies using keyword research and social media data. Also, some AI tools create social media content inside these social commerce campaigns faster than a human could. 

Content Creation

As mentioned earlier, artificial intelligence can help create the necessary content for businesses to grow their reach through search engine optimization. Ecommerce SEO now requires topic authority, meaning you must produce numerous articles on a subject to be considered for top rankings. AI tools make this process easier but push the number of content pieces you need to rank upward. 

Besides digital marketing materials, AI writer tools such as ChatGPT can create email marketing materials to inform customers of new updates with the platform. They can also produce excellent email copy to retain customers. 

AI tools can also review product descriptions from other platforms. They look to see how these pages rank in search engine result pages and how their wordings affect traffic and sales. Using AI for search engine optimization allows a business to understand its competition better and create content that aligns its products with customers’ needs. 

Voice to Text

The increased reliability of voice-to-text tools enables ecommerce businesses to grow their customer base. 

Virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa allow customers to engage in voice search for new products or services and voice orders to get those things. By breaking down the spoken word into its basic phenomes, AI tools link customer questions with relevant answers using similar tools and rules search engines utilize for page results. 

However, voice-to-text can do more than match products to questions. Businesses can use AI chatbots to manage minor tasks, such as customer service questions and newcomer inquiries about products and services. They also make websites more accessible, as voice ordering can be a game-changer for those who are blind or have a hard time typing. 

Offloading these tasks to conversational AI allows a business to focus more of its staff on innovations and task management, allowing the company to run with less overhead. 

Virtual Chat

An AI chatbot can fill many minor customer service roles. Customer service bots use a protocol that allows the bot to read through written text, breaking down the text into understandable phrases. The bot can then relate those phrases to specific areas of the customer support resources offered by the business. 

Chat-GPT is an example of the capabilities of virtual chatbots. Building on the GPT-3 deep learning model, this bot offers responses in a conversational tone, making it more approachable and human-sounding than chatbots from the past. 

As with voice-to-text tools, chatbots allow businesses to allocate human resources away from remedial customer service tasks so they can focus more on other, more important aspects of the company. While human workers for customer service are necessary, these tools reduce the number of workers needed in customer service by answering the more minor questions. 

Augmented Reality 

Partly powered by AI tools, augmented reality services improve customer interaction by offering new ways for customers to view products before committing to a purchase. 

One of the clearest examples of this utility is the visual search option offered by some retailers. These tools allow a customer to see how a product looks in an augmented reality space, giving them a better understanding of the dimensions and colors of the product. 

Increasing how a customer views a product also reduces the chances of an item returning to the business. Many online shoppers return items because of their inability to see how the product looks or performs before the purchase. 

Thus, using AI to power augmented reality tools helps reduce costs with returns since customers can now view more of the product before purchase. 

Ecommerce in the Metaverse

In addition to augmented reality feedback, the Metaverse is on track to shape the future of the average online shopping experience. 

The Metaverse refers to the growing virtual space that will act as a digital mirror to the real world. While this digital space still needs massive development, one thing is clear about the Metaverse: user-generated content will be critical. 

This comes down to the fact that users will have to create the spaces avatars hang out in, the music and services they enjoy, and so forth. The customer experience related to online shopping in the Metaverse depends on smart play and AI tools to generate content quickly enough to satisfy Metaverse goers. 

Omnichannel Ecommerce

Online retailers are growing wise because there are several ecommerce platform options for customers. Rather than limiting customers to one platform, many instead choose to integrate with other platforms and extend their reach this way. 

This interconnection plays a big part in omnichannel ecommerce strategies, which seek to lead customers through other platforms before landing the customer at the desired place. 

AI tools in this application offer businesses a way to create ecommerce marketing materials or content that stays consistent across all platforms. Software development on these tools continues to improve the voicing and readability of the generated text, improving the look and impact of the content.

Smart Search

Many users know that search engines use predictive text suggestions to help users find their results faster. Search engines use data from past searches to offer user suggestions based on common words and phrases that follow what users have typed into the search field. 

AI tools can use this search data to offer ads or other marketing materials based on the terms they search for. Advanced tools can even find correlations between search results to provide products to potential customers before they search for them. 

These features allow ecommerce business owners to create product discovery opportunities for their users in a more organic way. Given the negative opinion, many people have about traditional ads, creative solutions to get the word out about a product or service are essential for the future of ecommerce as we enter web 3.0. 

Personalization With First-Party Data

The AI algorithm that offers smart search suggestions also provides personalized product recommendations based on a user’s search history and other relevant data. 

Personalized recommendations refer to the recommended content and ads given to a user based on their search and usage history. These offerings are typical of social media platforms, where the platform sells space to advertisers who relate their material to keywords and demographics. 

Retargeting this data with AI software allows an ecommerce business to recommend products or services to a customer based on tags associated with a user’s preferences. As this data comes from the user rather than market research, the data offers better insight into what a customer might want compared to older data-gathering methods. 

Supply Chain Automation

An online retailer must maintain a healthy and organized supply chain to ensure that products arrive at customers who order them promptly. 

Inventory management tools use AI software to track inventory counts and automatically report or order new stock when needed. This automation allows those working in logistics to focus on problems rather than ordering everything that goes out of stock. Given the increasing number of products for sale online, this could free up hours of work for an inventory management team.

On the other side of the equation, inventory tools in manufacturing can automatically accept orders and add them into queues for production. They can organize deliveries and send them to the proper channels and workers for speedy packaging and delivery. Once again, AI software utilization reduces the time needed to produce and deliver goods.  

Dropshipping and Order Fulfillment

Dropshipping involves connecting customers with sellers through online portals and marketing materials. While drop shippers don’t have to worry about inventory, they need to worry about order backlogs, customer service queries, and website maintenance to ensure the business works well. 

For the best user experience, dropshipping-specific inventory management solutions are essential. These tools ensure that a dropshipping service can satisfy orders on time and track everything along the delivery process. 

Overall, these tools improve customer satisfaction and customer retention. Over time, customers with positive user experiences using a dropshipping service will return since they know they can trust the business. 

Reporting on Historical Data

Finally, AI tools can help data science by offering insights into customer behavior. While data analytics have been a large part of ecommerce since the beginning, ecommerce AI is making customer data science easier than ever. 

Most AI tools use data mining to gather customer data via search histories and similar actions, understanding how users operate. Over time, this data collection becomes a database of information for different customer profiles. 

By reviewing and visualizing this data, AI tools allow business owners to create actionable insights for their businesses. In particular, customer segmentation tools can give an ecommerce owner a way to see how different sections of their customer base interact with the platform and better serve them. 

AI software also exists to help quality assurance teams review customer service metrics. Many businesses seek to get data from customers. A company can identify where it needs to improve its services by parsing through reviews and feedback. 

Key Takeaways From This Article

The ecommerce industry has plenty of positives to get from using AI tools in 2023. AI in ecommerce is the way for businesses looking to get an edge today. ecommerce AI can help with business operation management, improved customer engagement tools, and overall customer experience.

Finding the right tools is a different struggle, however. Before committing to anything, we recommend checking out what AI tools offer eCommerce businesses. Find what works to give you that edge, and take advantage of ecommerce artificial intelligence tools as best as possible!

AI-Driven Ecommerce Marketing Agency 

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