We have been so habituated in online shopping now that we often don’t feel like going to a store to buy a product. Similarly, many retailers are now taking their business online. With every passing day, the number of online consumers and online sellers are increasing.

It is estimated that over 2 billion people will be associated with online shopping and selling activities. As the number of online shoppers is increasing, the ecommerce websites are now trying to take innovative approach.

From visual search to audio search to dynamic emailing, companies are doing everything possible to gain the trust of their online shoppers. Artificial Intelligence or AI has helped the companies to be creative. AI is also evolving every day and ecommerce websites can make use of it. AI has changed how ecommerce websites used to work, and will continue to affect ecommerce sites even in the future. If you want to know how, read on.

Targeted campaign for customers:

What is the difference between online shopping and offline shopping? Primary difference is the experience, right? When we shop in store, there are shop assistants to help us. They can guide us in buying the right product as per our choice. If you own a shop, you will know that more than often customers have queries about certain products. Sales assistants supply them with necessary information. Besides, they also try to understand the preferences of customers and suggest products as per their choice. Most of the time, a little nudge from the shop assistants make customers buy products.

However, you don’t have this luxury when it comes to online shopping. People know exactly what they are looking for and they search those items only. More than the experiences of shopping, people want their necessity to fulfill. Even if they have queries regarding any of the products, there is no sales assistant to help them out. You can’t even encourage them to buy a product since there is no way you can commute with them while they are shopping.

This is exactly where AI comes to help you out. AI helps you collect data about your customers. You can create a list of products suggestion for the customers depending on their search history and purchase history. You can even create targeted campaign depending on the collected data for each individual customer. Even without speaking to anyone, customers tend to purchase products that are suggested to them.

Optimization of search results:

While you may have a huge array of products to choose from on your ecommerce website, you may have listed the products as per keywords. Now, you can’t expect that each of your customers will know the significance of keywords. Or they will be pro enough to use keywords to search their desired items.  

So, what is the solution? AI can provide you with the solution. Using keywords is not enough anymore for your shopping site. It doesn’t matter what type of products or how many products you have on your website. If people can’t find what they are looking for, there’s no use of your website.

Apart from using the keywords, implementation of AI will ensure that your customers get exactly what they are looking for. AI collects data from the search history, the location of the customers, their purchase history and shows them products they are looking for. Besides, Artificial intelligence also shows keywords for easy searching.

Reduced cart abandonment:

Many a time you will notice that a customer leaves your website right before making a purchase. They leave the products in the cart. Your potential customer may have faced a technical glitch or may have gone through some unflattering experience before finishing their purchase. There are primary two reasons behind the abandonment of cart. Many people may start shopping on your website without even having an account. So, when they go to check out, the website may ask them to create an account. As it is a lengthy process, people abandon your website.

On the other hand, people who have account on your website may include items in cart. Then they may come across the same item on some other ecommerce website for lower price. They will obviously leave your website.

So, what is the solution to this problem? First, you have to understand why your potential customers are not completing their orders. If your website is AI enabled, you may ask people to log in with their social media such as Facebook account or their Google account. This will save them the time to create an account and will make the process much smoother. This will in turn reduce cart abandonment to a great extent.

In case your customers are leaving the cart without completing the transaction because of price issue, you can send them follow up email. It is seen that follow up emails often prove to be fruitful. You can take help from AI even in mentioning the reduction in price.

Moreover, AI can help you in understanding which of the leads are more likely to convert and help you be more specific with your follow up emails.

Answering questions:

I mentioned already that customers often have queries that are answered by shop assistants when it comes to brick-and-mortar shop. What will they do if they have queries while making purchase from your website? Customers may feel irritated if their queries are not answered quickly and it may result in cart abandonment as well.

Chatbots have become a part of many ecommerce websites. Chatbots can be programmed to reply to common queries. So, suppose customers are asking about the expiry date of a product, it can be answered by AI. Similarly, if your customers want to know more about the delivery details, chatbots can help them out.

For the rest of the queries that need human intervention, you need to have a dedicated team which can get back to the customer queries within 24-hours. You can program the chatbots to recognize the type of queries and forward those to the right experts.

Introduction to voice and visual search:

Do you know that we are entering a year when 50% of people will conduct web search through voice? As voice assistant devices such as Google Home, Alexa, Siri and all the voice assistants, more and more people are taking advantage of voice search. Hence, if you want to make sure that people shop from our website, you have to optimize your website. You have to ensure that your customers can find out the products they are looking for through voice search.

We are moving towards a time when we want convenience above all. And voice search provides us with the convenience. People can now listen to song or turn on the TV without reaching for their phone or the TV remote. The same convenience they want when they are shopping. If your website is optimized, your customers can place an order without accessing their phones or opening their computers.  

Visual search is also something that you should take seriously. Shopping is often influenced by what others are using. So, when customers don’t know the name of certain product, they may use the image of that product to search it. An AI optimized website will understand the images shared by customers and will find out the exact or the similar items.

Detecting and removing fake reviews

We all check out reviews before making a purchase decision. 90% of people go through the reviews section when they are researching about a product. More than 80% of people get affected by negative reviews. So, that is a huge number of people. Now, while many people take time to write authentic review, haters or competitors often misuse this platform. Fake reviews can have serious consequences on your business.

So, how can you make sure that you remove the fake reviews? You can take help of artificial intelligence. AI will help you to identify whether the reviews are written by authentic customers. Negative reviews that are written by verified users shall be taken seriously to improve what they found to be problematic. Also, reviews that are up to the date are more reliable as well.  

Optimized pricing:

Pricing is one of the most important factors of online shopping. Customers often browse through multiple websites to check out the prices of the same product on different websites. Now, if your pricing is not optimized, you might be lagging behind. Even if it’s theoretically possible, practically it is impossible to keep updating the price of each and every product on your website. Besides, how many times a day will you be able to optimize the price of the products?

And this is exactly where AI comes to help you. You will be amazed to know that Amazon.com changes the price of an average product every 10 minutes. It means that the company optimizes price 2.5 million times every day.

Okay, let’s admit that not all of us are as big a company as Amazon.com, Inc. However, if not 2.5 million times, we can optimize the pricing at least a couple of times with the help of AI. Artificial intelligence can analyze volumes of data. Thousands of customer details, their choices, their shopping patterns, product details, pricing details of each of the products, demand of the products, within minutes and optimize pricing depending on the collected data.

Prevention of fake goods sale:

You may be left surprised if you know that approximately 7% of world’s trade is based on fake goods. No matter how good your intentions are, unknowingly, you may end up being part of the fake goods seller. Unfortunately, if you end up selling counterfeit products even unknowingly, your reputation is at risk. Many luxury brands experience huge losses because of the counterfeit products sold in the open market. Reaching the right target audience through ecommerce websites has become even easier for the fake good sellers. It is assumed that the fake product selling market is worth $30.3 billion!

It is difficult for consumers to understand the difference between real product and counterfeit product. Even you, as an owner of an ecommerce website, may not be able to understand the difference. However, you can tell the difference with the help of AI. Artificial intelligence can monitor the keywords used; identify the differences depending on the images; spot even the minute differences etc. So, with the help of AI, you can basically stop 98% of the sellers from selling fake goods on your website.

Sales prediction:

You already know by now that AI gathers and studies the data on your website. But that is not all. Apart from all other benefits that you get from implementing artificial intelligence on your ecommerce website, you can also get sales prediction. AI notices the behavior of your competitors, demand and supply of products on your site, customer reviews, buying patterns of your customers, etc. to calculate and predict sales.

AI can also find out the reason behind cart abandonment and help you target the problem to solve it. You can manage your inventory with the help of AI so that you can stock on products that are predicted to sell well. This also allows you to stop investing on products that are not predicted to do well. 

Is artificial intelligence necessary for your business?

Even after this long discussion, you may have one valid question in mind. If you have been doing well without implementing AI for so many years, why would you need it now? Let me tell you that ecommerce websites that are driven by AI are doing much better than the ones that have still not implemented AI.

AI helps you to keep track of your own products, sales, your competitors, customers, reviews and many other small details. Suppose you still have not used AI but your competitors have. Aren’t they already in advantage?

Are you still doubting whether to use artificial intelligence or not? Well, if you want your business to grow and outrun your competitors, you will need to be brutally honest with yourself. And AI can give you the brutally honest results that can help your business grow.

If you need help with creating an ecommerce website that has AI implemented, Nico Digital is here to help you. We develop every type of website and optimize the website so that you get the best result. Contact us for more details.