Earning loyalty among online shoppers is tough for eCommerce retail companies. With a cut-throat competition dominated by large players, satisfying buyers’ expectations is challenging.
To succeed as a retailer, you have to get into the nuts and bolts of a customers’ digital journey, their spending habits, and the multiple touchpoints. This is where the latest technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) comes handy. AI can accelerate your eCommerce business and improve your profits as well.
The following five key areas have potential where AI can drive eCommerce sales:
Personalization
To earn customer’s loyalty, we need to personalize their shopping experience. AI-driven tools can help deliver personalizations and recommendations for each customer which in turn can improve conversions and enhance brand loyalty.
For example, Netflix has recommendation algorithms that analyze customers’ view history and predict the shows that they might like to watch. Similarly, in a retail scenario, recommendation engines can analyze the buying history and showcase relevant products that customers may like to buy. Accurate product recommendations can help grow revenue significantly.
Visual search can be facilitated with AI technologies wherein online shoppers can upload a product’s image and get search results that match with the product.
Search functionality is another aspect where AI-driven tools can help. Online buyers need quick yet accurate results for their searches. AI-driven tools can combine the customer’s past behavior, predict what could be the product he is looking for and fine-tune the search results.
Virtual Assistants
AI-driven tools like chatbots and shopping assistants enhance online shopping experience by saving customer’s time and energy in choosing products. Virtual assistants like Amazon Alexa have changed the way consumers order products online. Social media platforms that are integrated with eCommerce sites become a sales channel and customers can directly purchase their favorite brand’s products without visiting its online site.
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Natural Language Processing (NLP) and similar algorithm-driven techniques are helping to achieve personalization in chatbot conversations with the customer. For example, Ticketmaster processes queries like “What’s happening tonight?” from Facebook users and provides accurate results to easily buy event tickets. With the maturity of AI technology, chatbots can have human-like interaction to discover customer’s requirements and deliver more accurate results.
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Purchase & Inventory
Retailers find purchase and inventory management quite challenging. For instance, sales can be lost when items are not dispatched quickly or when a product runs out of stock, too quickly. There are several other situations where inefficiency and purchase planning and inventory management can incur huge losses. These behind-the-scenes processes can either delight or frustrate an online customer. Thankfully, AI-driven tools can help retailers ensure a seamless buying experience.
AI-enabled demand forecasting can predict product trends, seasonal changes, shipping lead times and more, to reduce the risk of out-of-stock items and delayed dispatches. AI tools can analyze customers’ behavior on the site, their search history and look for other elements like competitor pricing, to arrive at a reliable prediction. Thus, AI prediction can help retailers make informed-decisions like which products should be kept in stock and determine attractive pricing.
User Experience
Intuitive assistance in shopping can ease the buying journey. Retailers have to focus on User Experience (UX) to achieve a seamless buying experience. By deeply understanding the buyer’s intentions, retailers have to rethink and develop interfaces that allow customers to easily interact with the online store.
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To optimize the UX, data insights like how many customers clicked the ‘Add to Cart’ button, how many people read the articles, the most-visited pages in the store and many such data points can be fed to the AI-driven tools. Based on these data points, AI can deeply analyze, calculate patterns and provide insights. Thus retailers relying on AI for UX, can reduce their time spent in decision-making and deliver a better customer experience.
Data Security
Online retailers have to protect their site from fraudsters trying to steal crucial data like customers’ credit card details and damage site reputation through fake reviews.
AI technologies skilled in pattern recognition can reduce the risk of online frauds. AI tools learn from every transaction and recognize patterns across thousands of online transactions. These machine learning algorithms can spot digital transaction frauds, unusual patterns and identify orders that differ from regular norms, which humans find hard to detect.
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Customers are influenced by reviews as it helps to know more about the product and decide quickly. However, fake reviews tend to plague the eCommerce sites and stopping fake reviews is a must to earn the buyer’s trust. AI algorithms are good at distinguishing genuine from fake reviews which help retailers maintain data accuracy and build trust among customers.
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Conclusion
Knowing the 5 key areas where AI can help retailers enhance customer journey, it’s time to explore which AI-driven tools can help your business grow. Not all AI-based technologies can help you maximize profitability. You may need guidance from digital agencies that are specialized in eCommerce platforms.
At Ziffity, we provide AI/ML expertise that can help retailers engage customers through chatbots, product recommendations, analytical intelligence, image processing and more.
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