With multinational technology companies like Google and Microsoft investing heavily in AI technology, it is predicted that more than 80% of interactions involving retailers and end consumers will push through even without human cooperation by 2020.
The question here is, how will online retailers utilize AI to fulfill their consumer’s demand in the near future? And how can it improve consumers’ online shopping experience?
The Rumors About AI Technology
Since the past couple of years, AI technology has created a lot of buzz within tech world for many reasons. Be it Google for acquiring an AI startup called DeepMind that specializes in machine learning technology or Saudi Arabia for allowing citizenship to an AI robot called Sophia, artificial intelligence has already embedded itself in all aspects of our lives.
The rumors and speculations about AI technology vary from general public to business corporations. It was also rumored that Facebook chat bots were eliminated for public use. Some say it’s because they became a lot smarter and started to lie.
Many e-commerce businesses have already started experimenting with how to integrate AI into e-commerce. Their purpose is to enhance customer experience and increase conversion rates. Others use it to better understand their customers, generate new leads, and provide an enhanced customer experience.
Personalized and Targeted Recommendations
It essentially helps to integrate machine learning AI technology towards assisting customers filter their search automatically based on their needs. Even the experts quote Amazon’s algorithm that focuses on item-to-item collaborative filtering. It displays customized content directly on the homepage as soon as a visitor lands on the website.
By focusing more on targeted recommendations, online retailers can encourage customers to spend more. Not only that, with artificial machine learning algorithms, online businesses can also learn and predict their customers’ buying behavior.
Adapting Customer Centric Approach
According to recent studies, almost 30% of customers abandon their shopping experience due to irrelevancy of products displayed during their search. Integrating machine learning algorithms that narrow down results based on customers interest could be the next big thing.
The only challenge here for online retailers is to incorporate natural language processing that filters and displays results exactly the way humans do. Adapting this customer-centric approach will not only improve the average user time on site. It can also minimize the factors that influence a customer to abandon their search.
Similar to voice search, augmented reality also falls within the crater of building apps. They allow visitors to see the world as they do. Incorporating advanced image and visual recognition similar to Pinterest’s new chrome extensions, shoppers can now pick any photograph and ask the platform to display similar products using image recognition software.
Implementing Virtual Assistants
No one can deny the fact that most of the shoppers still prefer to buy in-store than shop online. According to an independent study, almost 85% of shoppers in U.S. still prefer shopping in physical stores than shopping online.
Converting these prospects into customers can be approached as tagging individual products with colors, sizes, and similar specs that customer search for and then allowing AI to interpret search as retail assistant to surface appropriate products that match their interest and buying needs. Virtual assistants still have to go a long way in terms of understanding and processing natural language and then helping shoppers online by interpreting searches that people are making using words or text.
See Also: 5 Reasons Why You Should Consider AI Automation for Small Business
Preventing Counterfeit Products
For an individual consumer, it is absolutely impossible to identify counterfeit products over original ones. In many online stores, products displayed on the website are not always similar to the products delivered to the customers. That’s one of the main reasons why shoppers abandon an online store from making another purchase in the future.
Training AI to identify counterfeit products can be the next big thing in machine-learning technology. It typically takes a long time for an online store to identify a third-party seller that’s selling fake products on their store. Product ratings, sellers posting rate, and even identifying fake review are some of the things AI can help you with.
Helping e-commerce stores to tackle counterfeit products with help of AI can potentially increase the value of authenticity and loyalty from old customers.
Takeaways from This Post
No one can deny the fact that the future of AI in e-commerce is already here. However, it’s still too early to predict how businesses will tackle AI to improve their customers’ shopping experience.
AI is a machine learning technology that will make it possible for online retailers to analyze millions of interactions on a daily basis. It can help develop businesses to personalize targeted recommendations ranging from a single customer to making a stack of shoppers with the same buying behavior.
Not only that, sales teams are now also getting trained to improve sales cycle backed with AI-backed applications. This targeted approach will not only help online sellers to engage the right prospect but will also help deliver the right message at the right time.
See Also: How to Easily Build Your Website with AI
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Author: Sean Frederick
Sean Frederick is a content marketer who's been covering articles for several online shopping platforms since 2008. He's a writer by day and reader by night who has submitted himself for providing readers with visual journey of online world.
