How AI is Used in Ecommerce

Artificial intelligence is big business, with the industry reputedly worth $62.35 billion in 2020. It’s used across the board in everything from healthcare to town planning, and no industry is likely to be left entirely untouched.

With that said, certain industries are more ready to embrace it than others, and ecommerce is arguably one of the industries that’s most ripe for disruption. There are a number of reasons for that, and we’ll take a look at them in this article.

And so, if you’re ready to get started, let’s jump on in and take a closer look at how AI is used in ecommerce.

How AI is Used in Ecommerce

• Personalization

Personalization is one of the greatest advantages of using AI, because it’s so much better at it than any human being could be. It can make sense of huge amounts of data to remember the thousands of visitors that your websites and social media profiles have and to tailor the content that they receive accordingly. For example, if you know that someone has spent a lot of time visiting the sportswear section of your clothing ecommerce site, you can serve up content that relates back to sports.

• Translation

Most modern translation tools like Google Translate are already using artificial intelligence and its sister technology, natural language processing, to provide more accurate translations. For ecommerce companies, AI-powered translation is ideal because it allows them to localise their content across different markets without the hassle and expense of hiring a bunch of specialist translators.

• Customer service

Perhaps one of the most interesting use cases for AI in ecommerce is that of customer service. That’s because AI can be used to power automated chatbots, and if you partner that with machine learning, then you can create yourself a chatbot that learns to get better over time based on its interactions with customers. AI chatbots can also integrate with your CRM system to retrieve customers’ data and to provide more accurate responses.

• Optimization

Another big advantage of using artificial intelligence is that it can provide a helping hand when it comes to conversion optimization. Also known as A/B testing and multivariate testing, conversion optimization allows you to test different variants of the same page to see which one works best. When it comes to ecommerce sites, which often have hundreds of thousands of pages, artificial intelligence can help to power countless conversion optimization tests and to automatically update your website to use the most powerful variants.

• Recommendations

Recommendations are AI’s bread and butter. Successful recommendations engines like Amazon’s and Netflix’s both use AI as a key part of their programming, and there’s no reason why your ecommerce company can’t follow suit. The idea is to crunch the huge amounts of data that are being created to make product recommendations that other, similar shoppers purchased. The more data that these algorithms have access to, the more likely they are to convert a recommendation into an actual purchase.

• Fraud prevention

Fraud prevention is understandably a major concern for ecommerce companies because if they fall victim to fraud, then they lose customer trust and risk going out of business, especially if the fraud involved is at a large scale. Fortunately, AI is great at spotting fraudulent transactions, which is one of the reasons why it’s been widely adopted in the banking industry.

• Marketing automation

Finally, AI is a key tool under the bonnet of most modern marketing automation platforms, and it’s what makes them so powerful and allows them to automate so many tasks. Marketing automation can allow ecommerce companies to manage all sorts of automated approaches to marketing, from advertising and retargeting to powerful email marketing campaigns.

Conclusion

Now that you have a good idea of how AI is used in ecommerce, it’s over to you so that you can start putting artificial intelligence to work for you. Don’t worry too much if you don’t have the capabilities in house because it’s easy enough for you to hire AI developers to do the job for you.

The good news is that it’s not too late for you to go ahead and get started, even though AI is already becoming a vital part of ecommerce across the entire industry. Just make sure that you don’t dawdle too much because we’re already approaching the point at which AI is going from something that’s nice to have and a potential competitive advantage to becoming something that you’ll need just to stay relevant.

So now that you’ve heard from us, it’s time for you to share your thoughts. Have you used AI for ecommerce, and if so, what kind of results have you experienced? Be sure to let us know what you think in the comments.