Artificial intelligence-powered technology is among the most influential and promising trends in the eCommerce industry. After all, if you can enhance the customer experience and make your own life as an online retail business owner easier, such implementation can pay off greatly.
On this page, we’d like to bring up 5 AI-based things you should allow your users to do on your website to grow your conversions and revenues. Plus, we’ll back up the given ideas with examples of how famous websites are using these features.
1. Try Things on Using Augmented Reality Technology
The first point featuring artificial intelligence is advanced functionality that connects augmented reality with online sales. Analogous to face masks and real-time beautification tools that people fancy using on social media or when holding live calls and streams, this tool is placed on eCommerce store pages and allows users to “put on” products and see them as if in a mirror.
This is a very advantageous tool since store owners can save a lot on real testers or time for returning items that didn’t match or fit. With the device camera, a customer can play around with different item variations, finding what’s right just for them. Of course, this can help those customers who hesitate or are unsure whether they should order the item or not.
To provide you with an example, below is a screenshot of the Snapscara washable mascara product page on the official Maybelline New York website. By tapping the “TRY IT ON” button on the page, the shopper is provided with the chance to link up the live camera of their device or to upload a photo of themselves. The technology then “applies” the mascara in the selected shade so that the client can see what it may look like on them in real life.
To be fair, yes, a lot here depends on the quality of the camera that’s used, how good the lighting and color rendition is. Yet, in general, this future-oriented technology is already a hit among users and store owners.
2. Resolve Issues with Digital Assistants
The second block we’d like to bring up deals with the use of AI-run chatbots to enhance online retail stores. Time is very valuable, thus, if a client has a question about a product or their order, he or she usually wants to get replies fast. Thus, a bot that’s available all the time is a great way to free users from the necessity of waiting on hold to get a reply from the human client support specialist nor having to stick to their working hours.
And if the occurred issue is resolved quickly and successfully, users become much more satisfied with the provided service.
Such chatbots function based on scripts. The artificial intelligence bot gets a hold of data that covers various scenarios that allow it to resolve different client requests. In cases when the chatbot fails to help someone, the request can get forwarded to the human customer support team and get logged. Logging here is also a crucial point since the bot’s knowledgebase can expand, so it can get better at what it does.
Here’s a case in point, below is a screenshot of the Digital Assistant Chat box that’s present on the official Victoria’s Secret website. As you can see, this helpful bot is immediately available to help the user. It offers several paths to take with the communication, pitching topics like “Order Status”, “Modify an Order”, etc. The user responds by selecting provided options or by typing in text in the bar.
3. Search for Products Using Voice or via Image Upload
The third artificial intelligence trend in online shopping and retail is related to advanced search. The pace of life is very accelerated, people are always in a rush and they want to get results of what they’re searching for fast and they want them to be precise.
That said, this alone explains why the phenomenon of voice search is “pushing away” text search. Thanks to artificial intelligence, voice recognition and understanding human speech highly upgrade the way we look for things online. Especially keeping in mind the ever-growing role of our voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, etc.
But mentioning image search, it is a top-of-the-line feature because a user has the chance to attach a photo that depicts an item that they like. And instead of surfing hundreds of pages all over the web in search of this thing or something similar to it, image recognition in eCommerce does all the hard work for the person and does it super fast.
To show you how such functionality works, here are screenshots of the process on Amazon StyleSnap. This tool gives shoppers the chance to upload pictures, then it studies what is on the picture and distinguishes the key products. Once done with that (and it seriously takes about 10-15 seconds!), the user is offered items that have similar styles. The listed products can be bought.
4. Enjoy Personal Product Pitches
The next block is devoted to AI-personalization in eCommerce. With the number of users and customers continuously growing, it becomes hard to please them all.
Among the main rules in marketing and sales revolve around treating each customer with an individual approach. This is what people expect even when they are shopping online. So, apart from polishing your texts, it is wise to get a hold of next-level personalization that becomes possible thanks to artificial intelligence.
We’re talking about the product pitches that aren’t made at random. These aren’t just your habitual “We also recommend”, instead these are collections of items that a specific user may like. AI crunches and analyzes tons of data, studies this person’s previous orders and which products were browsed, then, based on the received results, pitches individual items that the person may like. Obviously, this is a very effective move that can increase average cart sizes and make clients happier.
Just take a look at the presented below screenshot of the Louise bag’s product page on the official Coccinelle website. Below the product overview, there is a “You may also like” section in which we can see a personalized selection of items that the user can be interested in.
5. Buy Recommended Related Products
On a similar note, we’ve come to the fifth way artificial intelligence functionality can help to enhance online sales, it’s smarter upselling. A large portion of items that are added to the cart are added there unintentionally. The shopper wasn’t even planning to buy them. How does this happen? Due to powerful cross-selling.
Artificial intelligence monitors the top sold product pairs and combinations and then places these results in separate up-selling sections. So, you don’t have to guess which items are good together, you actually know. This is very handy if you have a large and constantly changing and growing product base.
For instance, this is how the official MAC Cosmetics website presents such a “Works Well With” section on the product page of lip gloss. They took the “Thought you might also like” idea a step up and put together product combos that can match the browsed item and make a good supplement to it.
To Conclude
To sum up everything mentioned in this post, artificial intelligence has already got its feet well under the eCommerce “table”, establishing its influence on the sphere securely. With the help of AI-powered tools by top software development companies or app development companies, you can understand your customers and their desires better, resolve many of their needs, and start reaping the benefits of improved communication with users, better customer satisfaction, and a growth in revenue.
Alex Husar, Chief Technology Officer at Onilab with 8+ years of experience in progressive web application development, Magento migration, and Salesforce development. He graduated from the Czech Technical University and obtained a bachelor’s degree in Computer Software Engineering. Alex’s expertise includes both full-stack dev skills and a strong ability to provide project-critical guidance to the whole team.
