In recent years, the advances of AI and AI tools has brought about a transformative wave in the world of ecommerce. Due to AI’s ability to analyse vast amounts of data, extract valuable insights, and make intelligent predictions, it offers efficiencies and improvements to the way online retailers operate and engage with customers.
The AI tool ChatGPT helped me to write that introduction. And if you’re in the world of ecommerce, AI could help you too! Businesses of every nature are adopting AI into their processes at a rapid rate. According to a Forbes Advisory survey, 64% of businesses expect AI to increase productivity.
While the world is seeing AI innovation in everything from AI toothbrushes to AI robot bee pollinators, our team at StudioForty9 wanted to provide a summary of the most practical and beneficial uses of AI tools in ecommerce that we believe will support growth and efficiency for your business.
5 best applications of AI tools in ecommerce
1. AI tools for personalisation
StudioForty9 client Tony Kealys uses Shopbox AI on homepage
Say goodbye to generic homepages and the days where customers have had to wade through pages and pages of products to find ones that are relevant to them. AI has stepped in to analyse customer data on your site to create personalised shopping experiences.
AI analyses data from your visitors such as purchase history, browsing behavior, and demographic information. It then generates tailored product suggestions with the result improving customer satisfaction and increasing conversion.
Some great tools when it comes to personalisation include Shopbox AI which adapts the shopping experience in real-time according to the visitors interests and behaviour. Shopbox AI curates the products displayed on your homepage and on your product listing page.
GrapheneAI is another tool by Advanced Commerce using AI that is highly specialised for the fashion industry. GrapheneAI uses AI-driven deep product tagging technology to enable you to implement merchandising strategies.
2. ChatGPT 3rd party plugins
Shop app’s sales assistant
Imagine just telling a shopping app what you are looking for and it returns a list of curated results. Well thanks to the Klarna and ChatGPT integration, now you can!
Users can now install the Klarna plugin from ChatGPT’s plugin store and ask it for shopping ideas, even feeding it more information to refine results. Customers can then view the products on the Klarna app and compare prices and products.
Shopify has also leaned into this use of AI with a new app called Shop aka “your new shopping BFF”. The app is enabled by ChatGPT to help you search for the items you need. For example you can tell them you are going camping and chat with the shopping assistant about what you need to get for your trip.
Expedia, Zapier, OpenTable are all among the list who are in the first wave of 3rd party plugins with the app, with a waitlist to be added to the plugins - no doubt this waitlist is growing by the minute!
3. Using AI in product search
While the ChatGPT plugins are certainly cause for excitement and could become a go to resource for many aspects of life, how do online retailers start getting this type of AI onto their own site to assist shoppers?
One answer is MOI. MOI is the new product from search and discovery platform Klevu. MOI has been built using a clever mix of Klevu AI and Open AI. The chat is designed to compliment Klevu’s area of expertise which is search. MOI gives visitors to your site the opportunity to ask for information about any data that is indexed by Klevu, including product descriptions, attribute data, popularity, even sentiment from reviews and more. Helping visitors to find exactly what they are looking for without having to trawl through your site to find it.
4. Save time on product descriptions with this AI tool
Writing product descriptions is a constant battle. With some businesses processing hundreds or even thousands of new products at a time, just how are you meant to write product descriptions for all of these without delaying getting them live? The sheer practicality of resourcing the task means that most online retailers have to run with some pretty generic copy, often copied and pasted directly from the supplier.
You can now make life easier and product descriptions faster with the new feature on Shopify called Shopify Magic. Input a few quick notes about your product including any keywords you want to rank for in search engines and the AI tool Shopify Magic will generate a product description for you then and there.
5. AI assisted customer service
Gorgias is a tool that provides multichannel customer service on a single app. It is designed to bring efficiencies to your customer service and has added AI to its list of ways it can support your team.
The Gorgias AI tool uses machine learning to analyse your past tickets and learn your team’s tone of voice, language and brand policies. Then using GPT-3 it suggests brand-friendly responses for your ticket to give your agents a head start. Your agents can choose to edit the draft, accept it and send it or write their own if needed. This saves time and helps you to give a cohesive customer service experience to your customers.
And that’s just the beginning for AI tools & your business
According to Statista, from 2020 to 2022 the total yearly corporate global investment in AI startups increased by five billion U.S. dollars. With such interest and investment, it’s safe to say that many more innovations will be coming from this area of technology in the coming years. As well as continued enhancements in all the areas mentioned above, this really is just the starting point for AI in ecommerce.
In the future AI is predicted to advance in areas affecting ecommerce such as voice commerce (Alexa +++), AI image generators (bye bye stock product images), self driving delivery vehicles (potentially more polite than some of the ones we have met), interactive shopping experiences (expectations from the movie Clueless might finally become a reality) and many more areas.
Our team will continue to keep a close eye on what AI tools can do for online retail and support those we work with to adopt new uses of AI where important gains can be made for their business.
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StudioForty9 are experts in all things ecommerce, our clients lean on us to find solutions for their business to help them to grow and succeed online. We make it our mission to know and explore the latest technology and trends and find the best fits for our clients. We are also working with AI to bring new solutions to our clients through our own technology.
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Main image by Mariia Shalabaieva on Unsplash.
