Artificial Intelligence in Ecommerce: 5 Practical Implementation Approaches

Artificial intelligence in ecommerce is paving the way for store owners to take better control of how their stores run and provide a better experience for all their customers. As a matter of fact, according to McKinsey research, 71% percent of shoppers expect to receive personalized interactions, and more so 76% of them get frustrated when they don’t receive any personalization.

If you haven’t been prioritizing AI experience so far, or if you’re looking for new ways to wow your customers and excite new customers, implementing artificial intelligence into your ecommerce journey is a must for your business. We have gathered five practical approaches for implementing artificial intelligence in ecommerce.

In this post, you’re going to learn:

1. Why you should use AI within your search functionality and how it helps customers identify products they want to buy
2. How you can use AI to retarget customers who were looking at specific items but never made a purchase
3. How to use AI within your marketing to improve the levels of personalization you offer to your customers
4. Why AI is crucial for optimizing your pricing strategies
5. How to implement AI within your chatbots to provide shoppers with 24/7 support

Let’s go!

Use AI within your search functionality

When a potential customer lands on your site, ideally, they’ll know exactly what they want to buy. But if they don’t, they might want to look around. Now, in a brick-and-mortar store, shoppers are able to physically walk around. The same isn’t possible on an ecommerce store, which is where AI comes into play.

When you search for certain words on ASOS, you can see a range of other searches you might want to look at.

In the example above, we’ve searched for “gym”. Now, ASOS is a clothing website, and their technology understands that if someone is searching for the word “gym,” they’re probably looking for gym clothes. From the drop-down options, you can specify whether you’re looking for gym bags, gym tops, gym leggings, and more.

This is effective for people who use different phrasing to search for products, or also for people who might be interested in a product they haven’t considered. Suppose I went onto the site to look for gym leggings. When the drop-down list presents me with gym bags, it could spark some interest in other product options.

Use AI to retarget potential customers

When you start to track how your customers and potential customers are interacting with your site, you’ll notice that there is a range of customers who visit your site, look at products, and maybe even add them to their basket – but fail to make a purchase.

There are a number of reasons why someone might not fulfill their purchase, including:

1. They no longer want the product
2. They don’t think the product is worth the money
3. It could be that they got distracted and plan to come back later

If it’s the final option, even if someone plans to come back and buy the product later, they might forget.

That’s where AI comes in. Artificial intelligence is great for identifying customers who looked at your products and retargeting them. AI-powered tools like Facebook Pixel and Google Ads are effective when retargeting your customers. Through retargeting, you’re able to meet your customers at other sites on the internet.

From the customer’s point of view, they could view a product on your ecommerce store (not make a purchase), and then in two days, they might see an advert on a social channel for the same product. This time, they are more inclined towards making a purchase since they have gotten familiar with the product. This use of AI is great for winning extra sales.

Improve pricing

Knowing how to price your products is a struggle for any ecommerce owner. You want to avoid keeping your prices too low, as it can lead to poor profits. On the other hand, you also don’t want to increase your prices too rapidly for fear of losing customers.

But deciding on your prices needs to be backed by data. If you simply just guess what price you think you should place your products at, you’ll run into problems. We’ve explored various different pricing strategies you can implement in this blog, but one of the most common approaches to assist any strategy with the use of artificial intelligence.

By using a price tracking tool, Prisync, online merchants are able to track the current and historical prices of their competitors’ products. Prisync lets them utilize AI-powered smart pricing suggestions on how to price products.

Without AI, you’d have to manually track all your competitors’ products’ prices and then manually decide how much to increase or decrease yours by. No need to mention that the manual price tracking is a waste of resources that could be spent on improving other aspects of your ecommerce business. With artificial intelligence, you can automate your pricing to ensure you have extra time available to do the work that truly matters.

Increase personality with chatbots

Chatbot adoption within ecommerce is growing rapidly. You can use chatbots for a range of different things on your ecommerce store.

You might want to:

1. Help customers locate specific products
2. Use it as a personal shopper
3. Allow customers to ask previously asked questions, like shipping times or out-of-stock products.

The LEGO chatbot, for example, helps customers pick the right gift. You’ll have access to personalized recommendations directly to you. You’ll start by receiving a number of pre-written questions. These questions help the chatbot identify what sort of product would be best for you. Once you’re happy with the product, the chatbot automatically adds it to your basket, streamlining the entire process. Many shoppers miss the experience of chatting with a real person as they do in brick-and-mortar stores, so using chatbots is one way to replicate that process.

Be certain that if you are going to use chatbots, they work well. Customers will very quickly become frustrated if they feel as though the chatbot is causing them more harm than good.

Final thoughts

From this post, you should have a clearer idea of the five ways AI can support your ecommerce store: search, retargeting, personalization, pricing, and customer support. As technology advances, AI opportunities also advance, giving merchants a better chance to improve customer experiences. Whether it’s automating your pricing, personalizing product suggestions, or retargeting customers at the right moment, AI gives you the capacity to do it all. It is time to start implementing artificial intelligence into your ecommerce store.