Why you need AI-driven eCommerce platforms.

Technology disruption over the last few years has completely transformed the rules of the competition and invented new value propositions and business models. Companies embracing eCommerce marketing strategies are experiencing rapid growth. eCommerce sales are expected to reach $4.8 trillion on a global scale by 2021. In terms of usage, there are more than 2 billion online shoppers worldwide in 2020, which is about 25% of the world’s population and it demonstrates the impact eCommerce has made on consumers. It is also estimated that 95% of all purchases will be made online by 2040. And hence it’s utmost importance for the eCommerce platforms to offer innovative offerings.

eCommerce platforms as of today.

Fundamentally, eCommerce platforms are the backbone of any online retail enterprise, that allows the front-end and back-end to work efficiently. They enable growth for the organization by providing seamless customer experience and helps expand its eCommerce offering. An eCommerce platform is the backbone of eCommerce that provides a strong structure on which a B2B or B2C eCommerce enterprise is supported. To cope up with the demanding agility of the market, continuously changing consumer behaviour, any eCommerce platforms should leverage the technology disruption by offering unique innovative solutions.

Ecommerce platforms today have moved beyond the traditional approach of hosting a simple store and allow users to simply buy products. Instead, they now offer an e2e integrated solution by combining all commerce and business functionality into a single solution via a SaaS model. With a cloud-based infrastructure that ensures 24*7 availability of the store, data that feeds in, eCommerce platforms today can create a most reliable, relevant, engaging and personalized customer experience.

In today’s era, Artificial intelligence – AI is one of the guaranteed technology disruptions that will help make the e-Commerce platform intelligent enough to offer smart business solutions.

How would an AI-backed eCommerce platform make a difference?

Since there are many eCommerce platforms available in the market, both open source as well as licensed, the key to making your eCommerce platform unique is by offering smart solutions by leveraging AI technology. Since AI can help tap into the end-user behavior, study, and help build customer-specific solutions, it acts as a bridge between SP and the customer. Here are some of the key AI solutions that will offer a unique offering to the customers. The use of AI is proving to pave the way for eCommerce sites to offer unique offerings. eCommerce is on its way to grossing $700 billion by 2022. And AI is the most efficient enabler to achieve growth.

Here are some AI-based solutions that can be built and further improvised for the eCommerce platforms

1) Personalisation and customer engagement.

The online channel has a challenge of not having a direct connection with the customer. but this can be mitigated by studying customer behaviour through AI offerings. Using personal online data such as search queries, page visits, purchase history eCommerce platforms can help the store brands to transform their stores to best serve the customer’s interests. So when the user will log in to the account, based on his\her past purchase history, the store can recommend the best possible options, display advertisements based on the past search history, and can suggest the products that will go well with the products he\she has added to the cart. Personalized emails also play a very important role to engage with the customer. If the store can assure the data security, customers will not mind sharing the personal data as this would also benefit their shopping experience.

2) Chatbots and digital assistants

chatbots or digital assistants can play a significant role to enhance a customer’s overall shopping experience. These assistants can efficiently handle many tasks, generally assigned to a human, like managing inventory, resolving queries. Besides being available for 24*7, this would help human beings to focus the efforts on other key tasks. integrated chatbot \ assistant with the store will play a key role in improving the customer experience.

3) Automated product descriptions

AI is being extensively used in automating content creation. For any eCommerce platform, the product description is the key to keep your customer engaged. Managing product descriptions for the ever-growing huge inventory can be difficult. But AI can simplify the task by suggesting the apt product description. AI can fetch what is most often included in keywords and accordingly can come up with the most suitable product descriptions. It can analyze the effectiveness and can change the description if needed. It can also tweak the description based on the buyer’s interests.

4) Dynamic content creation

AI can serve users across different geographies, gender, age by offering dynamic content. hence your store can offer different discounts\banners to different users and can help increase the revenue conversion. AI uses various approaches to help stores set prices.Ai can help set the optimum price for each product, optimum price presented to each customer, optimum price in view of the market demand.

5) AI product recommendations

AI offers perfect solutions to recommend the right product to the users based on the user’s purchase history, searches, etc. Personalized recommendations encourage the customer to return to the site. It helps to improve the retention period of visitors which in turn translates into greater sales. Store browsing habits can generate valuable data for running various campaigns. Smart recommendations are transforming the way eCommerce stores are serving the customers.

6) Intelligent website search

Product search is at the heart of every eCommerce store. As it will help customers to browse through the huge catalogue of items and narrow down the search when he \he is sure or not sure about what to buy.

If your eCommerce platform is well fueled with AI-based power searches, it will not only result in improving sales but will also improve customer satisfaction. Based on the customer’s purchase history, browsing pattern, likes, dislikes based on the social media footprint, AI-based intelligent search can offer the best-personalized results, needs that are not revealed by the customer, improved site SEO and can also help in intelligent customer profiling for use in marketing.

7) AI-based post-sales service

AI-based customer service solutions will take care of the customer needs not only during the purchase cycle but also after the sale. So after the customer purchases the products, AI can offer automated post-sale followup, automated handling of complaints, return and refunds, personalized emails to provide the customized offers, receive feedback from the customer with Natural language processing and deep learning, AI has enabled to take care of the customer throughout the purchase cycle.

Since customers are at the heart of the eCommerce industry, AI-based solutions will help the e-Commerce platform to help them buy what they want \ help them decide what they want \ create an interest to buy. In addition to the above list, there are many more AI-enabled solutions which when glued with the e-Commerce platform can offer the best suite of solutions to the customers, high revenue translation to the stores making the deal a win-win.