You must have heard about artificial intelligence; it has taken every industry by storm. AI has entered our lives; take examples of self-checkout cash registers, getting driving recommendations, movie or series recommendations, etc.
Google and Microsoft are investing in AI heavily, and in the next couple of years, we are sure to see some major advancement. Yahoo, IBM, and Facebook have shown a keen interest in building AI as a new source of business.
In this article, we are going to discuss how artificial intelligence can give your online marketplace an edge over the competitors. Many e-commerce businesses are utilizing artificial intelligence to drive digital transformation, and the successful use cases depict the many benefits of leveraging the powerful technology for your business. Let's see how AI helps your e-commerce business:
Chatbots
AI-based/ Machine learning chatboats are equipped with the ability to answer different types of queries with the help of Natural Language Processing (NLP). In addition to that, chatbots are equipped with learning ability. Chatbots learn from past questions and answers. They become smarter with time.
Another thing about chatbots is their 24/7 availability. For those who find it difficult to keep the business around the clock, chatbots are a blessing. When the potential customers try to get in touch with you at 3 am by going to your site, chatbots will be there to greet customers and answer their queries about businesses' products and services. It is a boon for small and medium-sized businesses that can't afford to lose customers, hence help you increase ROI.
Like a human agent, chatbots provide text or voice support to customers. Chatbots are a great way to keep users engaged on your e-commerce site. Most of the time, users are provided answers from the database, but it looks like a real human interaction.
Sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis or opinion mining makes use of machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to analyze reviews, news, and social media posts, to get to know about the public opinion about their products or services.
How tracking sentiments around your brand help you? When you gauge the public's opinion, you understand what they liked or disliked about your product; by doing so, you can address the pain points and improve your products or services. You can take it a step ahead and pair the collected data with your customers' demographics to divide your customer database. By doing so, you can build a personalized strategy for your customers; personalized strategies are always more successful than one size fit all method.
Intelligent Product Recommendations
It's not surprising that personalized product recommendations in e-commerce with the help of artificial intelligence are increasing conversion rates. Big data and artificial intelligence are providing personalized product recommendations based on the searched products, online browsing habits, and previous purchases.
How product recommendations benefit E-commerce retailers:
- It provides a personalized shopping experience to users.
- More number of returning customers
- Improvement in customer retention and sales
- Enable a personalized business email campaign.
Vastly improved product search
Users go to an e-commerce site and search for the products they are looking for. If your product doesn't appear in front of customers, they will have a hard time on your site. Machine learning algorithms help in improving e-commerce search results and contribute to boosting click rates, conversions, and customer ratings.
Machine learning algorithms help users find exactly what they are looking for. If you want your users to have meaningful search results that are geared towards providing users that they need, you will definitely see conversions.
Retarget Potential Customers
Retargeting potential customers is beneficial for e-commerce sites; in fact, e-commerce sites make many initiatives to do so. However, it's difficult to say if your efforts will be fruitful; you don't want your efforts to get wasted on those users who have no intention to turn into customers. In this case, artificial intelligence is a lifesaver for you. With the help of marketing automation and AI, you can gather behavior and intention information from customers, which helps you to deliver digital promotional materials to convince buyers. Throughout the whole process, artificial intelligence will help you to monitor customers' behavior, histories of acquisitions, reviews, and demographic information. With AI, you can immediately evaluate data, and you can make progress on targeting potential buyers. You can re-target potential customers with AI when they leave your site. You can present them with advertisements on other browsers and websites.
Inventory Management
For an e-commerce business, it is important to manage an inventory efficiently. Your inventory should fill the demands of your customers without adding to idle stock.
Traditional methods of managing an inventory were restricted to the current stock levels, but with artificial intelligence, socks are maintained based on the data related to:
Projected changes in the demands of products
Sales trends over the previous years
Possible supply-related issues that could impact inventory levels
In addition to inventory management, AI is facilitating warehouse management with the emergence of automated robots. It is termed as the future of artificial intelligence in e-commerce. With the help of AI robots, businesses can stock and retrieve stocks 24/7.
AI is transforming the E-commerce industry in various ways. Not only is that, but AI in the B2B E-commerce sector inspiring a host of innovative solutions.
Final Words
Without a doubt, AI has a multitude of benefits for the e-commerce sector. With the help of user-friendly and automated artificial intelligence apps, e-commerce is benefitting greatly from AI. To stay in the competition, companies need to spend time blending AI with their current business operations.
Regina Deemer is a content writer, mobility strategist and blogger who writes on the latest technology and business-related topics. At present, she is working with Cerebrum Infotech, a leading custom software application development company.
