AI is causing shockwaves with the paradigm shift it is causing across verticals — and the ecommerce industry is emerging as a primary proving ground for the disruptive potential of AI. From improving the quality of customer interactions and providing highly-targeted product recommendations on ecommerce websites, to creating personalized marketing strategies for target audiences and streamlining business processes, let’s take a look at how AI and its related technologies are driving the progress of the ecommerce industry.
In this article we will show how ecommerce companies and online retailers, regardless of size, can harness the massive potential of AI in ecommerce to better inform their decision-making capabilities and ultimately drive profit and growth.
AI Writing Tools: Changing the Content Marketing Game for Ecommerce Businesses
One of the foremost and most compelling use cases for artificial intelligence in ecommerce is in the realm of content marketing.
All retail businesses need an ecommerce website to make it big in the online shopping world, and content marketing is at the heart of every company with an online presence. After all, you need to draw potential customers and eyeballs to your ecommerce business.
How? By creating targeted, personalized content that speaks to your potential clientele.
And that’s exactly why AI writing assistants have been all the rage — because they can help ecommerce business owners create better long and short-form content for their websites, socials, and marketing copy.
For example, our own Ghostwriter is a powerful tool that has been specifically designed for content creation in the ecommerce industry.
With Ghostwriter, ecommerce businesses can easily create high-quality, targeted content that resonates with their audience. Generate SEO-ready product descriptions, social media captions, landing pages, and other marketing copy.
By using Ghostwriter, ecommerce businesses can save time, improve their content marketing efforts, and increase their online visibility and sales.
If you have not tried an AI writer before, you will be surprised by how useful it is, as its output is essentially ready to be used without any additional edits.
AI copywriting tools achieve this by leveraging machine learning, NLP, and neural networks to automatically create unique, engaging, and almost human-like copy parsed from existing data.
Looking into the future, ecommerce businesses can leverage them by using their consumer data as input datasets for AI writing assistants to pump out highly-personalized content based on what their algorithms pick up from said data that is almost indistinguishable from something that a human would come up with.
Leveraging AI to Provide Highly-Targeted Product Recommendations
The year is 2023, and the key word is “personalization.”
Every customer craves a personalized shopping experience taking each of their individual preferences into account when doing their online shopping, regardless of platform. Meeting such lofty customer expectations can be tricky, but it’s of paramount importance within the ecommerce industry — particularly for businesses that cater to online shoppers.
One of the ways ecommerce companies can stand out from the rest of the competition is by providing product recommendations that relies on generative AI algorithms to create powerful, highly-targeted product suggestions and personalized recommendations based on online browsing habits, purchase history, and customer preferences to create a conversion-boosting online shopping experience.
Buyer profiles serve as another means to optimize personalization using AI segmentation. Using data from the customer journey from the start of the funnel to its very end, AI is a powerful tool that leverages the data from their previous conversions and past trends to fine-tune their marketing and create customized experiences for each customer.
And since AI can identify which types of content deliver the most engagement for your brand, the technology allows ecommerce businesses to create highly-relevant and useful content for your target audiences. AI also allows you to tailor their own products and service offerings based on the tastes, desires, and habits of your customers for more opportunities to drive revenue.
AI-Driven Inventory Management and Demand Forecasting
It’s no secret that all kinds of ecommerce retailers and businesses might find demand forecasting and inventory management tricky regardless of size. Predicting customer numbers and the inventory to meet them is never easy.
AI technology, however, is changing that in 2023, offering small to medium-sized enterprises alternatives to conventional demand forecasting tools. AI-enabled inventory management and demand-sensing tools can reduce supply chain management blunders by as much as half, based on insights from global consultancy McKinsey.
Demand forecasting AI tools can help any and every company in the ecommerce industry and other verticals to improve demand forecast accuracy, minimize markdowns and discounts, and contribute to a more efficient sales process (not to mention supply chain management) so that management can focus on strategy rather than deal with the minutiae of day-to-day operations.
Revolutionizing Customer Service with AI Chatbots
You’ll be most likely familiar with conversational AI chatbots on a variety of B2B, B2C, and online retailers’ websites. If you’re running an ecommerce business — or otherwise need to direct traffic to your online presence — you need to consider implementing AI chatbots.
And why not? According to Statista estimates, the AI chatbot industry is expected to undergo exponential growth in the next several years, ballooning from US$191 million in 2016 to US$1.3 billion by 2025.
This kind of AI software is revolutionizing customer service by providing instant, 24/7/365 accessibility for potential and existing customers, reducing operational costs, and boosting the customer experience through sophisticated machine learning algorithms that allow them to address a wide array of customer inquiries and provide personalized solutions depending on customer needs.
Ultimately, as more and more online retailers and ecommerce businesses adopt AI chatbots, they will become a key fulcrum that will drive customer engagement, 24/7 customer service, and brand loyalty moving forward.
Moreover, AI chatbots can be leveraged with natural language processing algorithms to provide personalized responses based on human speech, making them indistinguishable from a real live human on the other end of the chat screen. In fact, companies are building another layer of personalization by using multilingual AI chatbots, allowing them to break into international markets and provide the same service levels as they do with their core audience.
AI chatbots are capable of collecting, processing, and analyzing customer data arising from past interactions, past customer queries, online browsing habits, location, and demographics to build highly-targeted customer profiles which can lead to greater conversions and opportunities to generate revenue.
AI-Powered Marketing and Customer Segmentation
AI-driven customer segmentation is how ecommerce brands are gaining a competitive advantage to drive revenue in today’s market. As we mentioned earlier, personalization is the secret to creating exceptional marketing experiences that customers crave, and it is through AI-driven segmentation that companies can gain insights into customer behavior and market demand to create bespoke targeted marketing campaigns to stay ahead of the game.
By leveraging big data from a variety of sources — from customer data to social media and the entire internet — AI allows ecommerce businesses to drill down on the right customers with the right content, delivering the right message at the most opportune time. With AI tools, ecommerce businesses can hyper-segment each of their target markets using their collective customer profiles and tailor marketing campaigns and content marketing to cater to said segments.
Artificial intelligence tools also enable companies to measure how well their marketing campaigns perform and how AI-driven insights allow businesses to understand each of their customer segments and their responses to certain messages, offers, and promotions, besides allowing them to generate and manage leads from their client networks. Ecommerce companies can identify new leads and automatically schedule their content drips to boost conversions — plus fine-tune their messaging to make better-informed decisions as to how they run their marketing efforts.
Streamlining Ecommerce Fraud Detection and Prevention
Fraud via online payment platforms are constantly rising. According to studies from England-based market research firm Juniper Research, businesses will lose over US$340 billion due to online payment fraud in the next 5 years.
Ecommerce platforms and businesses can leverage AI to boost their fraud detection and prevention capabilities to detect suspicious activities, monitor real-time data, and nip fraud in the bud before it gets out of hand. With AI’s innate capability to draw from historical data and past performances, it can fine-tune its exclusion universe to drill down on potentially fraudulent activity that cookie-cutter anti-fraud software solutions cannot.
Moreover, given the ever-evolving nature of AI, it is constantly striving to diminish the number of false positives. That is, it is continuously making strides to ensure that no genuine users are blocked for undue reasons in the process. AI achieves this with such incredible speed and impeccable precision that it doesn’t detract from the overall user experience in any way, shape, or form. The most advanced AI-driven cybersecurity solutions require minimal resources and will not impede the performance of websites or mobile apps.
AI only gets better over time. The more data you feed it, the better the results you get. The same is true for fraud detection and prevention.
How to Implement AI in Your E-Commerce Business The Right Way
Now, just before you FOMO into integrating AI systems, you’ll want to check the following three best practices before implementing a full-scale solution or attempting to transform your ecommerce business with AI initiatives to make sure you don’t rush into decisions and waste oodles and oodles of time and resources on action-faking or false starts.
- Start using Ghostwriter.
Sorrywe had to! Jokes aside, we do strongly believe that Ghostwriter is the tool that will make the most difference for your business. Content and good copy is critical for the success of e-commerce, and Ghostwriter can generate top ideas that are ready for use!- Generate top ideas for e-commerce content effortlessly
- Create compelling product descriptions to enhance sales
- Craft attention-grabbing email subject lines for effective marketing campaigns
- Generate engaging Pin Titles and descriptions for maximum reach
- Get ready-to-use text for various e-commerce needs
- Map out your AI strategy. Every business has to start somewhere, and careful strategizing will help you map out your AI game plan and execute. Take some time and drill down on what goals you want to achieve by implementing AI. Small steps lead into big ones — don’t attempt to shoehorn AI into everything and see what sticks. Drill down on your goals, and build from them in the future.
- Leverage AI for Ads. AI allows you to quickly create the best possible combination for ads that will actually convert. Want to give it a try? Head to our Tailwind Ads page.
- Determine which use cases apply to your ecommerce business. AI works best in ecommerce companies when they’re at the forefront of business objectives and existing artificial intelligence models that are constantly being improved. That is, ecommerce businesses ought to focus on the bottom line and how they can create more revenue with the unparalleled advantage AI brings to how you look at your data.
- Consult an expert or two. Everyone’s an armchair AI quarterback nowadays, it seems, but trust us: you’ll do yourself a favor by bringing in an AI subject matter expert or two on a project basis to help you devise and implement a realistic AI roadmap to bring your ecommerce business ideas to life.
AI in Ecommerce: A Perfect Match
AI is a true game-changer in the ecommerce industry that every company in the sector will need to leverage in order to gain a clear-cut competitive advantage over the rest of their competitors.
How so? By creating highly personalized and targeted marketing campaigns, automated 24/7 customer service through virtual assistants/chatbots, and relevant product suggestions that contribute to personalized shopping experiences that boost customer satisfaction, increase their brand value, and bring better customer experiences for their target audiences.
AI will enable ecommerce businesses to create bespoke marketing and sales campaigns based on real-time and historical data, creating hyper-targeted and timely content, as well as uniquely tailored products and services matching the unique tastes of every single customer demographic they wish to target — both local and abroad.
