At this stage, anyone who isn’t making the most of AI capabilities for their eCommerce experience is missing out. There are so many ways that new AI technology can optimize the online shopping experience for your customers. This post will take you through some of them and how they can help your business.
Personalized Shopping Experience
Using personalization in your eCommerce experience is a great way of letting customers know you care. The statistics all point to the fact that personalization will greatly improve your eCommerce sales and customer satisfaction, so if you aren’t using it already, now is the time to start.
Giants like Amazon started leading the way when it came to personalized offerings, and now through AI advancements, it’s available to any eCommerce business who wants to use it. It can be used in different places on your website. Let’s take a look at two examples:
Search
Using personalization capacities in your site search is a great way to help shoppers along at a crucial stage in their journey. When shoppers use the search bar, there is a much higher chance they are high-intent shoppers and know what they are looking for. Helping them along the way by suggesting products they have previously viewed or shown interest in is a helpful way to speed up the buying process.
Alternatively, using AI capacities such as natural language processing and natural language search ensures that the ‘no results’ bar is never displayed. These modules mean that spelling mistakes and errors still return results. They mean that no matter the description used, relevant items that the customer was searching for can still be displayed. They mean that intent is understood, rather than just keywords. They also mean that synonyms and antonyms are displayed.
This is a whole new level of site search that revolutionizes the simple keyword only results. Adding these elements to your search will improve your sales, and show to customers how much you truly care.
Recommendations
Similarly, using personalization AI for recommendations can help to offer an optimized experience. Based on click profile data gathered through the shoppers online session, you can offer recommended products that appeal directly to them. This is a win-win as it is convenient for the shopper, and beneficial for the merchant.
Cross-sell and upsell recommendations can be a great way to boost AOV at the checkout stage, or at the product page level. The more accurate the AI is in understanding what the customer is interested in, the better the outcome will be.
Visual Discovery
Visual merchandising is understood to be incredibly important. The shopping experience, after all, does begin with our sight. If we don’t find a product to be visually pleasing, there’s a chance that we won’t make the purchase at all. Using high-quality visuals is therefore crucial.
Visual Discovery takes this to the next level, as it provides a natural product inspiration journey with an immersive online shopping experience. The AI tool can recognize products found within a single image, allowing the browser to source product inspiration naturally. This can be through images on social media, for example, which can then be directed to catalogs.
This creates a uniquely personalized experience to each shopper, and will improve their experience. It also creates the opportunity for increasing shoppers’ AOV in a user-friendly dynamic online experience. Making the most of the growing presence of social media with eCommerce is a benefit, too.
Conversational Commerce
One of the main drawbacks of eCommerce compared to brick-and-mortar shopping is the lack of sales assistants to aid the buying process. AI developed conversational commerce has now come in with a solution to this problem. The creation of chatbots and generative AI based on vector search has allowed communication between buyers and merchants to revolutionize.
Types of conversational commerce can include:
- Chatbots
- Live chat
- Messaging apps
- Voice assistants
All of these create the opportunity for shoppers to communicate with automated systems in a way that will encourage them to buy. AI can train these systems to understand the queries of users, present them with the best outcomes, and engage with them in a human-like way. All of this without needing any actual people to be present.
This will save your business time and money, whilst improving the shoppers’ buying experience vastly.
Predictive Analytics
Being able to predict demands in your business is crucial in terms of not over or under-stocking. AI has now developed the skills to be able to predict, based on past figures and other variables, what your customers will likely be desiring in the future. This is an incredibly useful tool for your business to have, that will result in reduced costs and overstocking.
Furthermore it will be possible to communicate with analytics in natural language as a result of advances in vector search technology. This means that understanding and engaging with analytics has never been easier. In terms of planning ahead for how your business operates, this is incredibly useful.
Conclusion
It is clear that AI can help improve your eCommerce experience in many ways. When using these capabilities you can offer your shoppers an optimized online experience, boosting sales and customer satisfaction.