Artificial Intelligence in Developing E-commerce: 4 AI-powered features

In today’s digital era, AI in eCommerce has become one of the things that plays a significant role in our lives. It is phenomenal how the traditional shopping of a brick-and-mortar system has been transformed into a one-click away system.

E-commerce is a form of linear development and has evolved over the years following technological developments, starting from old electronic data transactions, online transactions on a website, to online shopping which can now be accessed via mobile phones.

AI in eCommerce: Improving user experience

This evolution is inseparable from the purpose of achieving customer satisfaction. As an effort, e-commerce businesses nowadays have been adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) to modernize features and performances of their platforms.

According to John McCarthy, AI is used to identify and model human thought processes and design machines to mimic human behavior. So, what are the features of e-commerce that have acquired the touch of AI?

1- Chatbots

According to a marketing report of HubSpot, more than 45% of today’s businesses use bots as their marketing tools. Customer approach is one of the important aspects of e-commerce business.

Chatbots contribute as frontlines which enable customers to interact with online stores 24/7 with a quick response. This AI-powered feature provides customer-oriented services, such as completion of a shopping process, customer support, and product recommendation information.

It is designed to understand languages that the customers deliver with a technology of Natural Language Understanding (NLU). AI-driven chatbots analyze and study data based on previous patterns and histories.

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2- Product Categorization

Unlike offline stores wherein the products sold are arranged by their staff in shelf spaces based on categories, AI in eCommerce joins hands with product categorization of online stores.

People who shop online will want to find the product that best fits their criteria, considering its type, material, size, color, and price. Who would ever want to spend their time searching one by one amongst thousands of product choices?

However, AI-based product categorization that counts on machine learning can interpret text inputs of the product description and break it down into several related hierarchies. Finding your dream item among thousands of options is a snap now.

3- Visual Search

People at times find it difficult describing an item with specific characteristics through words and need visual images to convey it. 59% of respondents think visual information is more important than textual information across categories, as stated in a collaborative study between Performics and Northwestern University. This is what the visual search feature does in an artificial intelligence and machine learning based e-commerce.

AI visual search understands images with certain features and compare them with the similar ones, so that it displays items that are similar or even exactly the same. Online shoppers can now find products in a more simple and accurate way without having to think about the complexity of text information.

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4- Product Recommendation

Simply put, AI/ML-driven product recommenders are a group of calculations and algorithms that can intelligently recognize customer behavior patterns by learning from data which then validates to predict their preferences. When customers buy and tend to see an item frequently, the system will generate recommendations for items related to the ones previously seen or purchased.

A research by Monetate showed that online shoppers who engaged with recommended products had a 70% increase in conversion rates. In addition to help users find products they are interested in through product recommenders, e-commerce businesses also aim to persuade users with a wide-range option of products according to their preferences.

Eventually, the existence of AI in eCommerce development provides mutual benefits for both e-commerce businesses and customers. Shopping on e-commerce platforms nowadays improves user experience to become more fascinating, easy, and fast.

E-commerce businesses can also increase their revenue. What’s riveting is that changes in technology will continue to advance, and we will see how sophisticated e-commerce can be in the future with the support of artificial intelligence and its allies.